Northern Planner

Young lives are not one dimensional, lives never are.

 

I read something in the Observer at the weekend about young British people. I can’t find it and I guess you won’t bother following the link anyway

It was about a real tension and contradiction on their lives and how they go about culture, as we all know, or I hope we do, really great brands try and resolve tensions in culture.

That’s the problem with pen portraits and segmentations, or God forbid, focus groups, they try and reduce things down to simple, one dimensional observations.

Real life just isn’t like that.

If it was, I wouldn’t crave being by myself on my bike after a great holiday with the kids…..and yet miss them so much I can’t think straight if I’m away with work for more than three days.

Anyway, this article persuasively set out that the ‘hard work, growing up young, neo puritans’ side you will have heard about is live and kicking, but so is the instant gratification, show my life on Instagram, ‘Everything Now’ ‘Infinite Content’ without being content (I like Arcade Fire) side of their lives too. At once down to earth and tremendously floaty.

Who, buy the way, pity my generation for having such a boring up bringing without Wi Fi.

These two polar- opposites are real life. There’s power in contradiction, play in it.

 

Agencies are all trying to do the same stuff, it's not sustainable

 

I’m sure you’ve heard the children playing football metaphor, the one about how everyone just chases the same ball

It’s usually used by creative folks to show clients the need for distinctive creative strategy, my media agencies to show the need for thinking harder about media channels where no one else is playing…..well you get the picture.

The thing is, it’s happening more and more to agencies themselves. Creative agencies finding it hard to sell ads, so moving into the world of content, digital strategy and even media planning, while the media folks continue to move into content, pretending that data is the only answer to everything, tech and all sorts of special services, from creative designed for programmatic to the kind of partnership planning previously owned by the PR folks. Meanwhile PR folks are coming up behind with all of the above, with the advantage of knowing about influence.

And digital agencies continue to pretend that digital media is still a ‘thing’.

And the pace will only increase.

Now, you’ll be used to agencies squabbling over territory, with the familiar land grabs over core communications strategy, earned digital and the like. In the past, that was because most people in agencies never learned how to play nice. Creative agencies are possibly the biggest culprits, but I’ve worked with some very aggressive media agencies too.

But now, the battle isn’t about egos or landgrabs, it’s going to be about survival. Clients can’t be bothered to manage lots of agencies who don’t get on or try and do the same thing, it’s all a bit too complex these days and what we all do was only ever 10% of clients’ world in any case.

So we’ll winners from the organisations who can deliver great, neutral advice and ideas, nimble enough to be expert in a number of, what to be used to be known a disciplines. Planning, media and creative specialists, the consultancy folks if you like, who can’t think across the whole marketing piece will be seen like a football manager who is only any good at managing the midfielders.

There will be a small but robust group of specialists in implementation, probably the stuff that can’t be done by robots…great video production and imagery for example.

Hopefully researchers who can work across data science and ethnography, surely despite the need for arse saving in clients companies and agencies alike, we’ll see the death rattle of artificial qual like focus groups…or claimed quant survey only analysed on a short term basis (not to mention social sentiment being seen as anything but a picture of how people want to be seen, rather than what they do), I bet there’s some next generation insight gatherers who could make a lot of money.

This should be great news if you want to be stimulated, challenged and be prepared to be flexible, if you’re good or want to be. If you prepared to build value rather than follow the latest trends.

Because the thing about chasing the ball is that eventually it’s no fun and very few actually get to kick it, let alone score.

Keep Moving

It's good being in a job that's about people. What is more interesting than the wonderful, scary, frustrating, contradictory human race? The ones in real life, not the pen portraits I mean. 

It's also a constant challenge because while basic human  behaviour, tech and stuff means that the culture ad folks are really competing with (not the market) is shifting faster than ever. Certainly the media, paid and otherwise we exploit to try and reach them is evolving right in front of our eyes. 

And the pace is only getting faster. 

Knowing when an how to adapt is the trick, and when and how not to change, but adapt we must. 

The industry, your organisation and most most importantly,  you.

You'll find if you don't keep your eyes and ear open that sometimes your employer has become obsolete and you go down with them. 

Sometimes you wake up and see you have become obsolete in your organisation. Like the moment someone switches off a fridge and you only then notice the buzz, all of a sudden, something has been happening under your nose, your place has moved on, you haven't just like that, you don't matter any more. 

This shouldn't frighten you, it should excite you. If you're a planner, wisdom rather than information (data!!!) will always matter, as will the ability to look at things in the way others don't. But how you apply that, the tools you use and who you work with is, and will continue to constantly shift. You won't get bored and if you're one those who can embrace change and also keep core competence, you'll have a fine future. 

In other words, keep soaking up stuff from the world around you like always.

But keep a sharp eye on yourself, your specialism and your employer. Sometimes they need to change, sometimes you need to change, sometimes other places have magically evolved into the perfect place for you, where you're at and where you want to go. 

Keep moving, like a great white shark, you'll be fine, its only when you decide to stop moving forward that the problems start. 

Pixar, Vacuum Cleaners, the weakness of brilliant ideas and the genius in failing little and often

You may have watched Finding Nemo, you may have liked it (your kids will if you have them). It's one of the most successful animated movies of all time.

It nearly flopped. 

Previously, Pixar relentlessly put in an open feedback loop,  on all elements of the script development of all projects. That's right, one of the most successful creative company of our times have more in common with Team Sky than you might think. Marginal gains, relentless, little improvements of all tiny aspects leading to a game changing whole. Think about it, all aspects of the creative process open to honest criticism. In fact, with it built in.

They tried to streamline the process for Nemo, and it bombed in every audience pre-test. It was only when they went back to the constructive criticism that the genius movie began to take shape.

Compare that to most agencies, creative, media or whatever...the worship of the creative types or the grand strategists, the obsession with the proposition, the simplified comms strategy or the purity of the game changing creative idea. 

The worship of the beginning, the leap of insight (or the re-hashing of the obvious in many cases). 

Another comparison, Lord Dyson and his game changing new hoover. He wasn't the only one to have the insight about bagless vacuums. He was just the only one who could get it to market, could get it to work. After the insight, he relentlessly prototyped until the game changing machine evolved, emerged if you like. Flashes of insight are fine, brilliant ideas that word in the real word seem to require lots of hard an failure built into the system. 

The Japanese have a phrase for this, Kaizen...graduallist. Everyone in a Nissan factory is tasked with spotting little ways they can improve the whole.

You could say that proper brilliance is a little like Pointillism, a fantastic piece of work is actually made of of lots of little dots that gradually make up the bigger picture. 

So, thinking about marketing services agencies that tend to pride themselves on great ideas, originality and obsession with the best work. Perhaps the truth is that they obsess with great initial ideas, but miss a trick in making them truly the best work, because they're not stress tested enough. Also, once campaigns are signed off and they get made, it could well be that they should still have room to develop.....rather than 'don't fuck with the idea'.

Maybe the lead agency, who tends to define the core strategy and creative, should welcome early feedback from partner agencies and clients alike.

God help us, maybe the tissue session in actually a good thing.

Now before you object and tell me about the magic of true creativity, I give you the myth of great poets, the romantic legends of yore. Most of them took copious amount of drugs, not to alter their mind and dredge of insights from the ether. They took drugs that let them work harder, so they could chip away at okay prose and gradually transform it into the stuff of legend. 

Is your culture set up this way? 

Doing channel planning

This has been a long time coming.

I want to do this partly because decent media planning is a lot tougher than many think.

Partly because today's customer avoids brand stuff more than ever, and chasing them with re-targeting and spooky Facebook ads than know who are and what you've done are not the way to go.

Partly because good channel planning works with good brand and creative thinking. There's too much infighting between creative and media agencies. The more good thinking that goes into how to reach people BEFORE making ads and stuff, or at least, working together, the better for everyone.

And finally, I've learned a lot moving into media agency land from creative world, this is much of what I've learned, only fair to share with more creative minded planners, as those jobs continue to fade away, this might be a start of a Plan B.

So let’s start with a cliché that happens to be true.

Brands don’t exist in a bubble, they are part of culture and part of life. As culture changes, so therefore do brands and how they try and connect to people. Because in reality, brands are mostly a way to help us get through life without thinking too hard, perhaps the golden rule here is humility, assuming that no one really cares. Even the Guccis and Nikes of this world are not as important as your friends or the new Star Wars release, they’re not thought about that much and compete with other status symbols or tools for sporting confidence.

It’s also about behaviour, not just eyeballs. The context of where you decide to try and connect with people, your media ‘body language’ really matters. Just as it’s doubtful you would try and chat someone up in McDonalds, but likely you would try in a bar, when and where you decide to do things can matter as much as the creative work. Don’t believe the simplification that it’s just about reach, that’s the same as saying you just need to make people ‘aware of the brand’. I’m very aware of Donald Trump but believe me, I’m not a fan.

Now, like I said, life and culture changes. When I was growing up in the 80s there were four UK TV channels, then it was just the case of deciding over papers, magazine. Outdoor and radio…and direct mail of course. No wonder media folks were always down the pub, it was bloody easy. But culture moves on, people want more choice, they’re used to watching and reading what they want when they want.

It’s very, very complex. You can reach someone anywhere if you want.  But don’t discount the unwritten deal you’ve made with people. They still know that if they watch TV for free, or at a small price, the cost is being exposed to advertising. The same with commercial radio, the same with the price of print and digital newsbrands. They don’t get that with social and also outdoor, which is polluting your out and about. Spam is still spam.

All that complexity requires pretty hard questions to cut through what you could do and get to what you should do.

Who?

What?

Where?

When?

Why?

How?

The when and where become critical as people control their own schedule. But ‘how’s is just as important as the channels themselves.

Channel planning is about how to influence what happens in people heads, not just ‘reaching them’. I can ‘reach’ some very good looking women in high end bars if I want, trust me, I can’t influence them to talk to me.

So you need:

1. AUDIENCE UNDERSTANDING
2. KILLER INSIGHTS THAT UNLOCK THE BRIEF
3. THE ROLE FOR COMMUNICATIONS
4. CHANNEL IDEAS: CONTEXT & CONDUCT
5. THEN PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER

So…to audience understanding.

It’s quite simple and quite hard. You need to select an audience depending on how they interact with the category, your brand and even life.

This is based on work you should have done already…..what are you actually trying to do? What is the barrier to brand growth?

Then you drill into who this in among and the right audience to change this.

One of the most famous examples of car advertising was this Skoda campaign – the audience wasn’t just Skoda considerers, as they were already okay with the brand, it was rejecters who were stopping them by laughing at them.

 

Look at this famous economist campaign that was mostly outdoor. These days some idiots would tell you to do a tightly targeted display campaign aimed at people interested in current affairs and over a certain net worth. But this only worked because it was wasteful – intentionally seen by the public to ‘celebrate economist readers in front of the less enlightened’.

Sometimes it’s removing barriers. Sky TV used to promote movies and kids channels to the partners of the men who mostly buy for the sport so they could get sign off.

Old Spice here targets both men AND women. Buyer and consumer.

 

As a rule of thumb, don’t make the mistake of replicating the creative target too tightly. That should be tightly defined and, in many ways, conceptual. You want to build a picture in the audience’s mind of ‘who buys this’ – something usually a little aspirational. Media is most efficient when it reaches as much of the buying market as it can. Persil Mums never really washed whiter and loads of fat over 35 men buy Lynx. In FMCG, if your target audience varies more than 3% from the category profile, you’re being too narrow.

Put another way, is your audience big enough to answer the brief? Get the client to share any awareness to consideration to sales data they have, look at past work they’ve done on how advertising build awareness (I should say salience really that’s the only thing that matters). Look at the frequency of purchase and a whole host of other things. But to be honest, build the broadest audience you can afford.

Look at Stephen Kings consumer buying system. What stage of the journey do you need to influence here.

Look at their lives, what is the most relevant place for the brand to show up (even TV, ITV does the numbers in the UK but if you want to  appear cool and ‘discovered’ look at other channels and more innovation).

Consider that brands that connect closer to the point of purchase convert more – but also consider if you want context for the category buying behaviour or the creative idea. What I love about Old Spice is that it does both….the buying conversation and creative conversation are both about women buying things for men. Think about that, think the fact there is no such thing as a brand ad, only communication that addresses reasons people don’t buy. Even if that’s brand awareness, just because it doesn’t’ occur to them, doing stuff that isn’t relevant to the brand, no matter how much it’s recalled won’t cut the mustard.

The real task for us all is getting into the front of mind in as many situations as possible, that won’t happen if they don’t remember the brand and just remember the ad, and it won’t even then unless they can connect the ad to how they behave or feel about the category.

So, in a world where the audience filters our more brands than, don’t fall for the hubris of brand first, embrace people and go audience first – at least for channel planning.

How can you add value to their experience rather than interrupt or make it worse. Yes, it’s true that advertising people don’t like will work if you reach them often enough (based on shorter term metrics), but stuff people like can be more effective by nearly 11 times according to the IPA…and decent econometrics shows  great advertising pays back over 3-5 years. The further out from exposure, the more folks remember only how they felt. We all tend to do and buy the things that feel right, not what are right in a logical sense.

Now, the best way to unlock the brief is still a killer insight. Doesn’t have to be a consumer one though, it just has to be an observation that you know will make people go, “Oh yeah!” At once obvious and refreshing.

This is rarely a stat. And while we’re at it, logic and evidence rarely work with clients and certainly not your buyers. And insight gets into the heart, where most decisions are really made. I don’t mean that brand love rubbish, I mean you take notice and makes you feel something that lasts in the memory.

And no bloody generalisations…like ‘young people like music’. No point using insights everyone else is talking about, like the fact young people are very serious minded and hard work is cool. Everyone knows this.

For example, few brands seem to cotton on to the fact that British Mums are sick of the protective parent label and are sick of the knowing, arch eye-browed resourceful one who sorts out the issues created by bumbling Dads. In fact, they hate their partners being portrayed this way. It may well be that a brand celebrating Dads rather than dissing them might work well with Mums.

A powerful observation is that stats mean nothing to people in charity campaigns. Most charities try to use ONE person as an emotional example, but the truth is, most stuff hits home when it happens to someone you really care about. I think this is fascinating for brands that sell stuff too, it’s how celebrity endorsement works.

Once you’ve got a tight insight, you need to have a clear role for communications. It will set your media (and maybe beyond) behaviour. It will drive direction and drive ideas.

It should never be something general…like ‘celebrate life’. It should be specific, audience driven and create a clear context for the media and other activity.

Instead of celebrate life it could be ‘shake up young people’s view of the world by delivering the joy of life outside the filter bubble’ (I’d like to do this by the way).

Or even better, connect with today’s young fogies when they want to remember they’re young.

THEN you can look at channels.

Some of this should be based on what, when and how the audience consumes media and life of course.

But it should be informed by challenge you are addressing and how comms is dealing with it.  

The filter bubble idea above means you need to look at the times your audience goes outside the filter bubble…..when they’re engaging in mass media that isn’t ‘pre-selected’, when they’re looking to discover stuff. You might want to also want to ‘do it’ rather than promote it. That might mean the entire media plan is built on the element of surprise.

You could go further and build integrated idea around the fact we adopt new things that are just familiar enough. Have you seen ‘I’ve never seen Star Wars’. The entire media plan could be built on this premise.

 

But arriving at your list of channels and what to do with them requires rigour and hard questions.

Start again with you role for comms and turn that into three specific tasks (more than that is just a list, less is too narrow).

For the filter bubble thing that might be:

Land the idea where people come to together outside the filter bubble – TV, VOD, MAYBE out of home and mass experiential events

Broaden their horizons when they’re in discovery mode – search, Youtube, influencers

Deliver alternatives within the bubble – takeovers of genre specific radio, Spotify, Amazon

Narrow down channels and what to do with them with these questions:

Where can we be relevant? If we’re interrupting can we reward the attention? Are we able to be specific to the channel we’re using? What will people think/feel/do as a result?

And don’t forget looking at context. From selling a new water brand when people are most thirsty, to landing a new brand idea when it will have the most emotional punch.

You could even be topical, but in a new way. In the UK, the most likely birth times are September/October. Much of this is down to conception on New Years Eve, or in boring January where you’ve nothing else to do. Great context for condom brands, pregnancy test brands and also Pampers. Creatively fertile as well as media context.

If you want an over 35 married man to out on a ‘male’ get together, be that footie, the cimema or even laser quest, he needs sign off from the other half and it needs to be agree weeks in advance.

Then pull that all together into a simple one pager. Media and comms strategy needs to be complex these days because the environment is complex. But if you can’t explain in 30 seconds, you haven’t got something water tight.

To for example:

We need to get our brand tried by under aged 25 people

The problem is that they only try things from within their filter bubble – more of the same

So that means we need to shake up their view of the world by showing them the world outside of their feeds

We’ll use TV that’s big enough to reach them and cool enough to be credible to land the idea outside the bubble – contextual ads to objects and situations in the programming that inspire them to try just a little outside their comfort zone (even I like one Queen song and I hate Queen)

We’ll partner with Google so that in search and Youtube, they get served familiar but exciting alternatives just outside their comfort zone, endorsed by video influencers

We’ll broker a partnership between the Guardian (most trusted under 25 news brand), Netflix and Spotify to deliver free non-subscription content.

Finally, show them how the channels will work together, what the phasing is. This is best done by talking through the experience from the consumer perspective.

And you’re done.

Hope that was marginally useful.

No one has a clue. Good

Don't believe the hype.

No one knows what they're doing in this industry. That Global CEO who looks like they have got their shit together? Not a clue. Not a scooby.

Seriously, the more senior you get, the better you get at making folks believe you know what you're doing.

Just like the bigger and more venerable the agency, or even client, the more skilled they've become at inventing rules and practices to make it look easy and predictable.

It's not. Advertising and marketing are just parts of the wider discipline of business and economics. Now you find me an economist who looks like they know what they're doing.

Read Why Things Fail if you don't believe me.

Most brand launches fail.

Most ad campaigns are, at best solid. Most don't get entered into IPA Effectiveness Awards. And yet the IPA Databank is venerated as some kind of list of Golden Rules. Simply, it's another way to look like we all know what we're doing.

The great Paul Feldwick wrote a book on how advertising works. The conclusion? Sometimes it works in one way, sometimes it works another way.

That's why, for an industry built on ideas and new thinking, we're horribly conservative. No one wants the apple cart upset, you know, look like the rules and guidelines are great, when everyone works in chaos and then makes it fit the accepted wisdom.

You might think this is dispiriting.

You shouldn't.

Byron Sharpe kind of helps, but even there. the data often looks to fit the argument. The great disruption is beginning to turn into accepted received wisdom.........we all need a story to sell after all.

So yes, TV is dead, or it isn't. Programmatic is not to trusted, or it is. Young people hate advertising, until they do. Media agencies are going to be extinct when robots take over.

The reality right now is people know what's going on less than ever.

Which means every person working in this industry has the chance to invent the future. In fact, no they don't. They have the chance to do what the hell they like.

The role of planning folk was never be the voice of the consumer really, it certainly isn't now there are more kinds of planners then there are grains of sand in the Sahara Desert. It was, and is, to get the best ideas out of others and make those ideas palatable and seem predictable to client partners.

Because, Back to that Why Things Fail book. The best chance of avoiding extinction is to continually innovate - but as a rule, perhaps you should ignore that too!

In other words we're all planners now.Who's have thought that?

 

What Halloween tells you about brands and stuff

It shows you how the British are looking for any excuse to indulge these days, in a world where sobriety is cool.

It shows how parents are under pressure to perform like never before. Have a prefect party, the kids dressed just so, the perfect image on Faceook.

This picture though was on our own trick or treat run. A pumpkin the size of a car. to out do the other decorations on the street. It's a bit like advertising these days.

There's a truth that folks are getting wise to the act, especially young folks. They're becoming adept at filtering out the annoying dross. Like the 'impression' some media agency will count as a hit, which in reality is an annoying display ad that may as well not be there.

Or the massive grandstanding campaigns that still happen.

Walking down a street at Halloween with the increasingly , competitively, decorated houses is like the desperation of brands with ever bigger grandstanding efforts to get the attention, with this picture the apotheosis.

All the more ignored because of its blunt desperation. Like women avoiding those overdressed guys in nightclubs furtively dancing with the white man's overbite, people can smell the desperation.

 

Once upon a time, even when you could buy interruption, as opposed to the JWT fear model (Domestos ads let you know about the nasty germs in your toilet, scaring you into buying), some opted for charm and intelligence as opposed to calculation or brute force. Maybe we need to think about going back to that a bit.

 

Facts are pointless. Fact.

It's amazing how folks talk about post truth and fake news, because when it comes to persuading people, facts have always been a bit useless.

Fox Mulder from the X-Files was on to something. It's about the desire for something to be right, no more, no less.

It's a bitter truth about people that we make up our mind and then find the facts to fit. Blame evolution, no one had time to evaluate the evidence of being eaten by a Sabre Tooth Tiger, they just saw big teeth and claws and legged it.

Mostly, we decide things based on a long build up of experience, frame of reference and general world view. Facts are simply used to fit what we already believe or what we already want.

Worth thinking about when you navigate your own life, you won't change people's minds however good your evidence, in fact, you'll probably reinforce their beliefs. It takes a much longer build up of experiences, references and general change of world view...and changing how they feel before you change what they believe.

Which makes the role of a planner a hell of a lot more complicated than the textbooks would have you believe. Most research is, of course, a waste of time because what people do is very different to what they say.

But the role of research in dirty planning is also a waste of time. You know, making the research make the ideas, plan or whatever easy to buy. Because if the facts don't fit with what the client believes, they'll reject your thinking. Just as creatives, media buyers, suits or whoever else will reject your carefully developed, insight based strategy and briefing if it's at odds with what they have in mind.

It also means the role of value propositions in advertising, and reasoned arguments in general are waste of time with target audiences. No will believe you if they want to.

In other words, you have to be a lot more cunning.

The role of a planner and the role of most advertising is making people want to believe things, or think things without knowing they do. Clients, consumers, everyone.

Don't make the mistake of finding out what people think and then trying to change their mind, make it easy for them by finding out what they WANT to believe, or what they want to do, and making that fit your own agenda.

It's why most advertising works in the long term. It's not just that people are light buyers and so on, it's that changing what people think and how they feel about something takes time.

Or in the case of short term response stuff, getting the hell out the way and getting people who have already decided to buy to do it now.

It's why the most efficient predictor or advertising effectiveness is likeability. If you really like the ads, you'll then find the facts to fit why you want to buy stuff.

It's why borrowed interest, cultural appropriation and sponsorship can be so powerful. If it's familiar and fits with what we know, but retains just enough novelty, we'll give it a go.

Of course, now I've told you all this, you'll want to believe the opposite.

Tricky isn't it?

 

Falling Down

You may or may not remember Bruce Wayne's Dad telling him the reason we fall down is so we can learn to pick ourselves up.

 

Or, in My Rules..Toughen the Hell Up.

In this industry, you'll get told no more than yes. You'll get all sorts of knock backs.

A lot of the time it won't be fair. That's because there is not such thing as THE right thing to do, there is no such thing as an unarguable logic. There are only half truths in research, patterns in data and people's world view.

You'll get made redundant probably. People will get promoted above you.

Three options....

Give up and do something else.

Pick yourself up, ignore everyone and follow your own challenging path.

Pick yourself and forensically understand what went wrong so it never happens again. Don't pretend when it goes well it was all perfect either.

Some people get to the top through route two with a great strength of will and even more luck. But they fizzle out, it's knackering fighting everyone all the time.

Most of the people who get somewhere follow path three. They know stuff wasn't fair, but they learn they could have manipulated events and people to get another result (for example, creatives will always ignore the brief and try and do the opposite, there's a lot to be said for getting them to think of stuff for themselves).

They also learn to discern when actually, it was totally fair and they were not up to scratch. This always the hardest, it's much easier to blame everything but your own approach, sub-standard work or sometimes even lack of talent.

 Believe me I know, I was told more than once I would never cut it as a great account man and chose to ignore the advice, failing twice before I realised I should be a planner. It was easier to get angry than to get real.

Anyway, you end up with two kinds of successful agency folk.

The first is the incredible operator who can read people and situations and always knows what buttons to push and what not to. They know they are not the best at the craft skills  but manage to surround themselves with great people, get the best out of them and recognise their contributions. They're usually fully aware they're not the best and try to make the most of themselves.

The second is the craftsperson who has chipped away at the big rock of their talent, learning from each project, what worked, what didn't, what got great things to happen and what got in the way. Confident of course, they're never arrogant and ever ready to listen to others and bang their own heads against a brick wall to turn good into great. They might be shy, but learn to let their passion for their work shine out and infect others. They usually think they're nowhere near as good as they really are, so always end up doing great stuff because they try harder....and never look like a show off either.

Some bastards are combination of both.

One thing both have in common is that they've learned to be resilient, to welcome knock backs and, above all else, never ever lose their cool.

One tip for getting there.

No one, I mean no one, knows what they're doing. Everyone burns inside wondering what on earth they're really doing. This isn't physics, it's not even law where there are rules and truths for everyone to conform to. This job is about influencing people to want things they don't really need - unpredictable human beings.

Throw in the messiness of culture and there are no rules, simply theories that sometimes produce great results but often fail too. It's quite liberating to always sympathise with the individual who is ruining your life at this precise moment, rather than want to eviscerate them, know they're like you too, they haven't got a clue (even if they don't know it sometimes). Think about what's going inside - what is really driving them, what are they afraid of, how has their day been going?

Trust me, I still fail myself with this.

We're all people after all.

 

 

Your fast track insight generator - Courtesy of My Big Fat Greek Wedding

It can be hard sometimes to empathise with a target audience. Agency folk live in bubble most of the time, but even those with some feel for real life can struggle to connect with their bullseye customer.

For example, I used to work on haircare  brand aimed at fashion forward women. I'm a bloke with no hair and no sense of style at all.

Many women I know don't understand why men think football is life or death.

It would be hard for most blokes to get their heads around handbags that cost hundreds of pounds or dollars.

But it's not that hard. Our surface backgrounds and motivations may be different, but to quote the Dad in 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' some of us may be apples, some may be oranges, but we are all fruit.

The basic needs and motivations of human beings do not change, if you can find the find the right frame frame of reference, you can get into the heads of anyone.

For example, for a bloke to understand women's relationship with handbags, which is all about the right label and specific design making you feel a certain way about yourself and displaying status to others, it might be worth thinking stuff in your life that does the same thing. We all seek and display status, it's basic being human. Maybe think about the overpriced trainers you are wearing and how you decided to buy them, or maybe even a car if you're that way inclined (some bags cost the same).

Just as a women might want to think about a bloke and football by understanding how it feels when the girls get together. We're all social beings, we need to belong, men don't have that in the same way, they need football as glue. That might be one angle.

For the haircare thing, I happened to think about football because I know  both are about fitting in with complex rules and codes you need understand. I also thought about how it felt to lose it (not a tool for all of you of course). Men is part of bloke's confidence as much as a women's, you just don't have to bother with it the same, but the crushing realisation it was going I thought was the equivalent of a bad hair day. 

So...

Think about what you're selling.

Think about what basic human need it fulfills (they all do in some way)

Think of something in your life that performs the same task. What does it mean to you? Why and how do you buy it? What is the decision making process?

Works for me anyway.

Great for presenting too ,think it's the MC Saatchi model, but steal away.

Consumer truth +universal  human truth + brand/product truth = core thought

 

Never do for others what they can do for themselves

This may well be THE iron law of advertising, media stuff and brands.

It sorts out how to manage people. Make sure they feel like you have their back, provide guidance of course, but people in modern organisations crave autonomy.They also want to feel part of a higher purpose. So let them do what they can, make them feel they're part of something they care about that's achieving stuff they couldn't do alone.

Not to mention, we're all working faster and haven't the time to duplicate work. Most importantly, having folks operate just at the edge, or even just outside of their comfort zone is the most stimulating for them and how they'll progress and learn the quickest. We all want 'mastery' too, the sense of accomplishment, the joy of doing something well.

Sometimes it's quicker to 'just do it yourself' but it's a false economy.

This iron law also neatly skewers the folks who think consumers are stupid and need to be spoon fed messages and overly simple ad constructs. When people need to hold multiple plot points together in Eastenders or your country's equivalent soap, you really don't need to do their thinking for them and simplify stuff down to banality. No one wants to work hard as decoding cryptic advertising, but a Howard Gossage said, "When baiting a mousetrap with cheese, leave room for the mouse".

It answers the dilemma of 'content' 'brand experiences' and 'ad funded programming'.

All this has a role. But don't make stuff for people they can get elsewhere, which us usually better. That's why it's normally better to work with people already doing it well, be that people already making great content people like media owners, vloggers or whatever...but even here, what have you got they might want? Why on all earth would they want to make it for you? Above and beyond paying your way into culture, you need to add to it.

It informs challenger brand mentality. People are organising themselves these days, sometimes they just need a catalyst. Rather than helping people (or pretending to) how can we empower THEM to achieve what they want. Connect them to people like them in a way social media might not be right now.

Or at least move them to do or buy something they wouldn't usually. Make them think, provoke a reaction.

I always use The Old Spice guy as an example (sorry). It's hugely funny, entertaining advertising, much of the television programming (or YouTube drivel) it interrupted isn't as good. But there's a bigger tick - it provokes men and women to think a little about masculinity and the rules of their relationship.

This simple rule also questions 'brand purpose'. So many brands decide they want to do a variation on 'make the world a better place'. Not only is usually made up and not true, someone is already doing it much better.

It crucifies planners who decide to interfere in the creative process. Or media agencies who wade into creative agency business, or bloody ad agency planners who think they can plan media. Be very, very sure you are adding something that people genuinely want, or if they don't want it (let's face it, they don't) it's better than where they're currently at, or at least adds to it.

Creatives who think they can do strategy - of course they can, but it's usually very biased to something that will win an award or 'open on a palm fringed beach'.

Media owners who think they're ad agencies.

Propositions as thinly veiled campaign lines. Creative starters. Channel recommendations in a creative presentation. Content ideas in a media presentation. We're all at it aren't we?

Agencies telling clients their job, clients telling agencies their job. There's a comfortable overlap in the best relationships, but so many client briefs are really a solution, or even a series of orders with an unrealistic budget. So many responses to brief challenge that brief because the business context doesn't free up the work the agency wants to make, or fit the deal the agency has in place.

Most advertising in all it's modern forms is still interruption. Most new innovation is chasing people ever more sneakily as they avoid ads. In many cases, that means 'native' ads, where we actually give up on actually being able to make people care and produce stuff specifically designed to add nothing at all. Even re-targeting that shows you the product you looked at 30 seconds ago - if people wanted to look at it again, they're perfectly capable of doing so.

Yep, Never Do for Others What They Can Do For Themselves. Perhaps the only rule that matters (apart from don't listen to social media planners).

 

What I know about making and doing presentations

Not much is probably the answer.

What I do know, I put into one little guide for a couple of people, intended for presenting in the real world, not the imaginary one that exists in the case studies and most industry advice.

Anyway, for better or worse, here it is......

IS IT A PRESENTATION THAT’S REQUIRED?

Be sure what is really required is a presentation. If you want (or the client wants) a discussion, or there is less than 5 people in the room, you really need a meeting and probably a proposal or word document. Use powerpoint if you have visuals you need everyone to look at, or you need some data or charts for everyone to analyse together – but be clear, these are for people to talk about, not a presentation where you mostly talk and people mostly listen

STRUCTURING AND BUILDING IT

1. Always tell people what you are going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you told them
2. People tend to remember only three things from a presentation. Make sure you structure your presentation around the three things you want them to remember, tell them the three things at the start, remind them at the end and spend the bit in the middle convincing them why they should take the three things seriously
3. Getting to those three things should come from audience analysis. What do you and PHD want out of the presentation? What does the audience you’re presenting to want? There will be clashes of agenda , motivations and world views. Frame your three things around persuading your audience to buy into what you want out of the presentation
4. Find out as much as you can about the people you are presenting to, make your deck relatable to them. Find a hook, write a film log line for your presentation, based on the key tensions that will be in the room... if you know the biggest client dilemma is getting more budget out of the board, make that the key sub-plot. If you know you have two people in the room with opposing views, make your deck open up the debate
5. An easy way to win people over is using emotion. We remember how we feel longer than what we’re told. Make them feel something….don’t be afraid to use emotional blackmail
6. Tell stories, frame your entire presentation as a story with a beginning, middle and end. Think about stuff like this or the Pixar structure,
7. Use examples to bring the points you’re making to life. People react well to personal stories, so try and use them
8. Will all this in mind, don’t start with powerpoint, start with a succinct one page wonder – your summary script for the presentation. If you can’t get it down to a page, you haven’t got a tight enough story. Share the one pager with someone else, get buy in from the people internally you need to also.
9. Once you’re happy with the one pager, you can move to powerpoint. The purpose of powerpoint is to deliver exactly the right slides to deliver your story, always think about the deck as an illustration of what you will be saying, not the actual script.
10. Use a picture instead of words, bullets - no more than 5 - instead of a paragraph. Never write something people will read instead of  listening to you, write something that makes what you will say more powerful.

HOW TO PRESENT

1. Don’t worry about memorising a script. If you’ve developed your deck as above, you’ll know it all.
2. Most people (me included) are naturally not great presenters. Great presenters just prepare more.
3. So, re-hearse. Present to at least one person who doesn’t know the project. Make sure it’s the right length of course. If they get it, so will your audience. Also, the mirror neurons will fire and you’ll see the deck from their point of view and know how to refine it
4. Practise talking slower than normal. We all talk faster when we present, slow it down
5. Always stand up, accentuate confident body language. Stand up straight, imagine trying to get your head to touch the ceiling. Open stance – when you act confident, you feel confident.
6. Shy people like me talk quietly, practise in social situations talking a bit louder. Get your lungs used to working harder, I sing in the shower (seriously) Disney songs so the kids laugh at me.
7. Always stand to the right of the screen not the left. We read left to right, people will focus on you more if you stand where a sentence might finish
8. Never pretend to be something you are not. I’m not funny and never pretend to be. Be yourself – the universal rule is find a way to really care about what you are presenting. Your enthusiasm will be infectious. You don’t have to be slick, just look like you care

SOME CUNNING TRICKS

1. Edit, precis and distil at least three times. Every deck is too long, editing makes you see what is important and what isn’t
2. It’s a quirk of human nature that the more complex your language, the less seriously people take you. To be seen as totally on top of your game, make everything clear, simple and human. The more jargon you use, the less credible you will seem
3. Remember the Ikea effect. We tend to like things we feel we have helped create. Insert a mistake in your deck, let your audience correct you and they’ll feel they own in. Include your audience in the deck creation and they’ll support it even more
4. Only share the numbers and data that matters. If they ask for more, make sure you know what you left out, you’ll look totally ace when you nail it

Brands do things

I'm not the biggest fan of brand consultancies. Of course, some brand agencies are amazing, but they tend to be the exceptions.

When it's good,  they make stuff. Rather than charge £1000,000 for changing one word in the positioning statement and then churning out a stream of powerpoint to justify it, the good brand consultancy stuff is usually based on developing a product.

I'm convinced it's because they have no choice but to dig into how people will buy and use whatever they're developing, rather getting caught up with what it means for their identity.

You wouldn't believe the stuff I've 'borrowed' from product development research for comms planning. Loads of primary research on need states, buying behaviour, context and semiotics.

I find it much more useful to think about the connection between what people are doing and what they're motivations, mind-set and general flow is at various points - and what the brand is doing.

Now I don't buy all that talk about using data and stuff to precisely show up at the right place and the right time. That's the route to looking great in terms of cost per impression, but not actually changing much behaviour, or even worse, using a few clicks t look like you've people buy what they were going to do anyway.

New products fill gaps in people's lives, they ad something...functionally and emotionally.

Media, content etc should be doing the same. It might be a traditional message, but increasingly we need to ask what we're doing, not just what we're saying at this point. 

Think of some of the great ads (yes ads) people talk about. I find it easier to think about them in terms of a task based proposition rather than a 'message proposition'

For Old Spice -  create conversations between men and women about what a real man is.

 

The Famous Economist Ads sought to  celebrate the intelligence of their readers in front of everyone else.

Get the Lego Movie out of child's play and into the adult entertainment world (which ended up as a total ad break made of Lego..brand owners had their ads remade in Lego)

 

I think task based propositions are more useful these days that 'message propositions'. They unite creative media and 'content'. They make a brand not just say things, they make them do things.

Anyway.

 

 

 

Salience is not about one thing

There's a useful quote from Byron Sharp, "The task for marketing is to reduce the window between someone seeing an ad and deciding to buy".

There's much debate about the Ehrenberg Bass stuff, usually by folks with a particular agenda. Lots of folks trying to make things more complicated than they need to be.

But, like most things, the more complex things are made, the more likely they'll go wrong.

This single quote cuts through lots of rubbish on both the side of the brand babblers and the sales promotion merchants. Both are right, both are wrong.

There is no point having incredible distinctive brand communications if there isn't some stuff that nudges people to buy, or at least build some relevance to how, when and where it's bought or consumed.

Just as incentivising people to purchase doesn't mean they'll buy next time of their own accord.

Just as creativity isn't the only thing that builds so called salience and distinctiveness. Donal Trump gets America noticed more these days, not sure that's a good thing. You have to get noticed for the right stuff.

Basically, the more the brand comes to mind in more buying or consuming situations, the bigger it is and the more people buy it. It is that simple.

My advice? Strategy is is this simple and this hard:

1. Get the brands reason for being known about by as many people as possible, build consistent triggers the brand can own....every piece of communication should be building this
2. Get known in as many category entry points as possible. Deal with the obvious first....The Old Spice re-launch that pushed the envelope with 'The Man your Man Could Smell Like' dealt with fragrance first, as that's probably the main discriminator for men's shower gels. Just as the brilliant UK Honda work deal in the obvious, it's just it was brilliant- Cog was about the fact we don't want cars to break down, Hate Something Change Something was about the fact some people want diesel engines. The rest is creative magic.
3. Make sure you're front of mind in consumption situations, buying situations and other related situations. If you can, link them together...look for weaknesses in the purchase journey, focus on that. This one is critical. TV is still the most efficient way to reach the biggest audience and get the best result, but most TV is still watched in the evening. Don't add another channel, or 'non-tv' execution to the mix just to extend reach, when most products are bought during the day, and a huge amount are consumed at this time, get people thinking about your brand when they're most likely to buy it!

Anyway........

 

Wonderfully predictable.

I like staying in Premier Inns. This of course is part post rationalisation, as corporate travel budgets rarely anything fancier, but that's not the whole story. You know where you are with a Premier Inn, they all look the same, booking and checking in is pretty standard and you know you will get a comfy bed.

I also like Pret a Manger. You know you'll get a decent porridge on the go for starters.

Even McDonalds has nice reliability. On the go with a hangover, it's salty, stodgy breakfasts take the pain away for a bit.

You've got to hand to Channel 4 and ITV in the UK, as telly fragments, as does all media, there's something to be said for places where you know what you'll be getting, with only a touch of innovation.

Let's be honest, Jacob's Creek Wine is OK and you know what you'll be getting.

There really is nothing wrong with being quietly reliable and  just wonder, in a world where is hardly beer anymore, but grapefruit beer made by monks and food needs to be ever more inventive, the stoic, relieble companies that do basics right, or at least make things a little easy to navigate, might just do more than OK.

 

Rule 27 Give Up The Suits- Further Questions Answered

As mentioned before, some folks have queried some of the Rules from time to time.

It doesn't surprise me that there have been some queries on dress code, it's one the most contentious and thought about issues in agency land.

So I got this question:

"I've just started work at one of the most sought after agencies in town as a junior planner. As you can imagine, as a junior planner, I'm not paid a lot, but it seems the dress code for the agency is way out of my league. Not only do I not have a clue what is cool to wear (and I don't want to be seen to be copying everyone else), I just can't afford the stuff. You mention ditching the suits, I reckon a tailor made three piece from Saville Row would be cheaper!! What do I do"

To respond to this question, I'll take you back September 1990, the year I left from secondary school and returned a 'sixth former'. Sixth formers choose to stay and do their 'A Levels' the entry qualifications required for university. As school wasn't compulsory, neither was school uniform.

Naturally, we were all excited to liberated from the tyranny of itchy grey trousers, the school tie and light blue shirts designed with the sole purpose of making you sweat bullets, even in winter when they had the added power of making you simultaneously cold.

All this at the age when young men naturally sweat if an attractive girl moved within 10 metres of them.

So we were all gung ho to express ourselves, joyously wearing what the hell we liked. Only to find freedom was a living hell.

Suddenly, every morning, you had to decide what to wear. The fine balance between looking like an individual and fitting in.

Having to know what was fashionable, avoiding the crushing shame of turning up wearing the same as someone else. The horror of being caught out for wearing the same thing twice in a week.

So much pressure and thought, many of use quickly pined for the bygone days of the school uniform. Sweating through the polyester of your uniform shirt  if Gabriella Bentley even threatened to looked at you seemed like nirvana.

I often feel this way about the bygone days of suits in ad agencies (the simplicity, not the sexual tension).

I remember going to an APG training thing in London, when the venerable planning director running the session, (expensively dressed like a poverty stricken skater) commented, "The thing I always notice about the North is that they're still wearing suits".  This was 2002 and he was right, the suits still wore suits while the planning types tended to opt for smart jeans or chinos and some sort of suit jacket, with polo shirt usually.

It was blessedly simple.

Then everyone started to wear what the hell they wanted and a Pandora's Box of pain and suffering opened up on us.

Media agencies lasted a few years longer. Even now, you can get away with jeans, brogues the size of ships and a designer suits jacket, if you are 45 or over.

For the rest of us, it's the deliberations over how smart do you go when you see the client, are flip flops acceptable, shorts in high summer and what sort of image you want to put across. And, of course, spending loads of money on garb only agency folk will appreciate, while to everyone else, you look like you dressed in the dark.

In other words, a world without uniforms still forces you to conform, but without the comfort of easy to follow guidelines.

I used to work with Mother and loved the way the creatives all managed to look the same.

Three years ago, walk around Clerkenwell, all you could see was agency people with selvedge jeans turned up so far they were nearly shorts.

So, back to the question of what to do about it if you're in an extreme case, like the author of my question.

This brings us to the Devil Wears Prada (the film never read the book). It's not a classic, apart from the performance from Meryl Streep and the fact the hitherto unknown Emily Blunt stole the film.

Our hero, Andi, joins Runway magazine (Vogue basically) to find she will never fit in unless she loses weight (from thin to emaciated) and starts to wear the gear in the magazines with suitable panache.

 

By the way, this scene reminds me a many a discussion over two words in a 100 slide powerpoint presentation at work.

Oh, and I've worked for Meryl Streep's character twice. They know who they are.

Anyway.

After fighting the inevitable for a bit, like a racing cyclist in the 1990's trying to win without EPO, she gives in, loses a few pounds ad starts to rock the latest styles....and of course sees her star ride within the office.

 

If this doesn't look like the drip of folks walking into Mother then I don't know what does.

Of course, our hero eventually realises she has lost her identity and what she really cares about, ditches the wardrobe and leaves for a very different kind of publisher - always knowing she came so close to being seduced forever by the dark side.

My correspondent faces a similar dilemma. Clothes send out social signals, they always do. Not just on a personal level, they say something about the organisation. What you wear represents you and your employer, it's a fact, get used to it.

If you work at a place where you're under pressure to look amazing, or achingly obscurely cool, you know it will have a certain kind of culture. Probably, it will have a certain kind of work - usually, sometimes great, more often than not, up it's own arse. But always, always, a place people will die to work for.

That's for some, not for all.

Others will have some sort of uniform, sometimes more relaxed, sometimes it really is 'be yourself' we don't care. These places do great work, have a deeper relationship with the client because they care more about the actual relationship, rather than intimidating clients into buying what they're told.

This is for some, not all.

So, clothes, totally tangled up in identity on a personal and corporate level really matter. If you can find an overlap between your attitude to clothes and your employer's, you'll most likely find a cultural fit too. If they don't blend, get the hell out before it's too late.

Or at last until you've done enough time and got some 'cool work' on your CV - just don't stay too long to forget you're only pretending. 

Back to the cycling metaphor, Lance Armstrong only started taking drugs when he realised everyone else was, we all know what happened next.

One more thought - the more you try to look different, the more you usually ending up looking like everyone else .

 

 

 

 

Rule 30, getting out of the bubble - further questions answered

You might remember I posted some Rules a while back.

It might surprise you that people have asked one or two questions about it. This worries me, I didn't think of them myself, they are merely the sum total of years of observing what really goes on.

I thought  I would nevertheless publish some elaborations  I have shared based on requests for clarification here and there.

Today we'll focus on Rule 30. Getting out the bubble. Someone asked how they were supposed to do this when they are chained to their desk and also required to support their thinking with 'established' forms of research....you know, primary surveys, Google Trends or TGI and Touchpoints.

The response to this begins with a sad truth about a close friend and the breakdown a the person's relationship with their girlfriend.  The individual got the job of his dreams, you would want to work there, everyone does. He soon found that the new employer new this, and demanded the highest commitment and work ethic. 14 hour days in other words. He didn't mind, it was fun, it was stimulating. But a year later, the love of his life left him. She liked the income he was bringing in, she didn't mind seeing a lot less of him, she was quite a catch, very independent, lots of hobbies, lots of friends. One of those girls you hate because she was stunning AND searingly clever and interesting.

She left him because he was boring. Just doing his job made him a one trick pony, he ended up having nothing to talk about apart from work. Dull, dull, dull.

This is what happens with clients, and indeed agency employers. Clients like you to make them think, to look like you're one step ahead of them. Planners need the right to be in the room, creatives can do strategy, so can media buyers, even suits.... as well as their proper jobs.

A planner is there to do two things:

Make the original, new stuff safe to buy

Share interesting stuff no one has thought of (grounded in truth of course)

Like my friend, if you can't keep things interesting, or make the interesting easy to get to grips with, you are not needed.

Now let's look at that in more detail, based on the question.

First, if you're chained to your desk, and I mean you haven't time to wander around a shopping mall once a month, or chat to people you've never met on the tube, or read stuff only slightly connected to the day job and the client business, or just reading their annual report...then get out while you can, or manage your time better. Otherwise you won't be chained to your desk anyway, you'll be fired.

Second, once you create some time, and you have some proper insight from the real wold, the trick is to THEN apply it to some of the accepted tools - use TGI, touchpoints or some survey, or street interviews to make what you've discovered easily digestible. The real craft of planners isn't to simply find a strategy, or insight nugget, it's to make it easy to buy for clients who don't like taking risks.

In other words, the real craft isn't about insight, it's about how you tell the story.

Which brings me to another relationship. The one with my 5 year old, Star Wars loving daughter. She's a little headstrong, I need to make her WANT to do things. How?

I tell her its what Rey would do.

 

Some thought on How Brands Grow and Byron Sharpe

The email question:

"Always enjoy reading your blog. 

 

I read "How brands grow" as it was something mentioned in your blog and have a question. Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I didn't understand what the implications are from a communication perspective and wanted to understand what your take away was. I currently work on a brand where the laws in his book serve as a bible. When we have conversations around this topic, I can't help but feel the clients and I have different interpretations of what the laws mean from a communications perspective. Take the idea of reaching light buyers. The clients interpret that as having a message that can resonate with everyone (literally) while, I still feel it's important for a brand to have a clear POV in order to provoke consideration. 

 

Another thing we debate over is distinctiveness vs differentiation. Can you please help me understand the difference based on your understanding? It seems we use these terms interchangeably. Isn't distinctiveness based on a differentiation? I'm confused"

The response (this is my view, please form your own!!!!!!):

Got to agree, don't take any marketing book as law. However, stuff in here is really useful, it's how you apply it!

For me, the book is saying:

Reach as many people as you can afford, because growth comes from lighter buyers

Keep on reaching them, folks are not very loyal and forget brands very quickly

The role of advertising is simply salience - get the brand to be the first one that comes to mind in buying situations

That means from an execution perspective, the worse thing you can do is produce formulaic advertising because no one will remember it

It also means make it stir the emotions, they get the brand encoded into the memory better than 'rational messaging'

It's more than that, you need to make the brand distinctive.

Sharpe says most people can't tell you why the brand they buy is different, but I don't buy that, they just can't articulate something that is instinctive and about how something feels. Nike FEELS different to Adidas, just as Apple feels different to Samsung. That's why media like TV is still so efficient, it provokes emotional response best.

Sharpe says be distinctive which I get, basically, don't mess around with 'differentiation' especially rational stuff, just make your brand and product stand out

You should read the follow up book, there's some really useful stuff on building salience. Because simply standing out is waste of time, every piece of advertising needs to get people to think of the brand in as many entry points into the category as they can - remove reasons not to buy and create new reasons to buy. Sometimes that's because the brand is uncool, sometimes they think it's overpriced, sometimes it's a fizzy drink they don't think of consuming at lunchtime.

I agree with the client that you should try and make the communication appeal to as many people as possible. That means if you sell soap powder, it's a massive audience of anyone who is the 'main shopper'. If its golf, it's only relevance to middle class men...and increasingly women. Once thing Sharpe does really well is dispel the myth of segmentation. If you look at what makes people different, you'll find it, but equally, most people care about the same things and are never as different as you think. Even in this age of fragmented media, Star Wars s still a massive hit, in the UK the media that does the best numbers are the big TV channels. Just make sure the brand has something new and interesting to say about something about the category people are interested in.

I tend to find going out and talking to real people soon shows you most brands are talking to pen portraits and miss what people really care about. For example, you can't move for soft drinks brands in the UK talking about low sugar and health...and forgetting that they are bought because they are supposed to be a treat and taste nice....and they like them with food, especially these days as people are drinking alcohol less. I've found they are drunk on an evening more and more by young people out and about and also gaming at home, or watching telly, I can't name one soft drinks brand with am interesting point of view on the evening routine.

Also, we're seeing more and brands getting bought on peer recommendation. That's another reason to target mass media and provoke conversation, getting talked about sells, I wonder if targeting conversations and the intersections between people is getting more useful that targeting 'people'.

A short answer to distinctiveness v differentiation is that distinctiveness means you target getting remembered for anything at all costs, even talking about generic stuff in a way no one else does. Differentiation means something clearly unique to the brand. in many cases, something folks don't care about. People are looking for short cuts in choosing stuff, simply having heard of you and feeling good about in many cases is a great start.

That's why building up ownable assets is so important. Visual symbols, emotional territory and triggers. Take alcohol. Nearly every beer brand talks about masculinity. Stella Artois grounds this in ownable french sophistication, despite being from Belgium, a chalice to drink it in and white, grey and red colour palettes. Heineken is green, about  being a capable male, discovery, football and possible one bloke being at the centre of the party.

All fizzy soft drinks are about refreshment. Coke is about making you happier, Pepsi is about enhancing the moment, IRN BRU in the UK is about fortification and so on...............

Hope this helps

What my shaven left leg can teach us about working with clients.

When is the last time the advice you gave a client turned our perfectly in the end? Seriously.

Of course, if you're in the shifting brand health scores business, I guess you might answer pretty recent and very frequently. But about the job we are supposed to be doing? Transforming business?

We're very sure of ourselves most of the time, I've seen many cases when agency folks berate clients who 'just don't get it'. Sometimes that's genuine belief in some great thinking or work, sometimes it's clients not buying into the usual questionable evidence from the industry.

Like the IPA Databank taken as the be all and end all, when the research base is tiny next to all the campaigns that really happen...and fail or. For example, would you put your own money on outspending equivalent market share, with supposed guarantee it will pay back? Based on evidence from a pool of case studies that the authors strongly believed worked. What about the massive budgets on campaigns that didn't?

I think the Byron Sharpe stuff is fantastic, but a brand I work on has grown 10% this year because current buyers are purchasing a lot more frequently. Penetration is not always the only game in town. We've built penetration with an NPD launch it's true, but the volume and value are dwarfed by people buying the core product more. Guidelines are great, but many 'iron laws' are a lot more bendy than we think.

Just as  someone I know wrote an awards paper recently where they made the data look like loyalty had built growth, when in this case it was recruiting new buyers, because 'disrupting' conventional wisdom always plays well with judges.

Which brings me to my left leg.

Shaven, as is normal for cycling types, but with a persistent niggle in the hamstring and sometimes knee that is only just going away after six months. I've done some decent miles and put some okay power down, but lost a big training block overall.

I have also gone through three physios. Each an expert, each totally confident in their expertise. After years of hard sports stuff, I know my way around the human body, but still desperately wanting a problem solved and totally at the mercy of 'experts' is a sobering experience for someone who earns a living giving advice to people.

And each physio gave different advice. The first made it worse. The second made no difference, while on correct diagnosis of the core issue, the third has cracked it (thinking about brand stuff, the first two identified symptoms, not the core driving problem, sound familiar!!!???).

It's like that being a client. Pounded by confident advice by experts with no room for being wrong, being admitting you don't know it all shows weakness and in our macho culture where loudmouths tend to do best, this isn't allowed.

In a pitch, you'll get three agencies with three different solutions, all totally sure they're right. You'll even get 'partner agencies' arguing in front of the client.

Advertising and stuff is not an exact science. Science isn't an exact science either, not just physios, the best physics minds in the world can't agree what the fundamental basis of reality is. In fact, no one knows why you get a headache.

Look, I bet you're good. I bet you're smart and rigorous and all the rest of it. But from now on, when I'm advising clients using my so called 'expertise' I'll be remembering how it felt to desperately want my physio to help me and how crushed I felt when the advice was so wrong.

And angry.

We've all been to the doctors, we know how it feels to be patronised by someone with knowledge in a field we haven't.

Or even worse if you've moved house in the UK and had to pay a solicitor wads of cash for making your life harder, you'll know what it feels like being helpless in the hands of a charlatan.

The more we remember how that feels, the better we'll all be.

(of course, there are clients who self diagnose and just order the agency to apply the medicine. That's a very, very different story)

Feeling more

Years ago I worked on a pitch for a car brand. The main idea we came up with was 'the brand that makes you feel more'.

It came from the observation that modern middle class men were pretty jaded, with oversupply of stimulation on all fronts, they had become 'numb'.

Thought, and still do, this is an open goal and not just for men, as we're all more stimulated than ever, but do little that's real.

A was re-watching Life on Mars recently (UK version!). A man who comes back from a purgatory set in the 1970's for police. Eventually he wakes from the coma that put him there, but prefers the 1970's version because in real world, he realises he 'feels nothing'. Certainly compared to the simpler, but more visceral 1970's life where experiences are real and not 'simulated'.

 

He kills himself to feel alive.

That's the real need behind the rise of more extreme sports for both genders - the need to feel something, for flow etc in a jaded, distracted world.

Perhaps it's a better interpretation of the 'man of action' archetype. Or not.

I always thought it was how this ad was really working...

 

Anyway.

 

Shopping love and online

It's years since I read Daniel Miller's 'A Theory of Shopping'. Something or other at work made me look at it again and it's still interesting.

Basic premise, most acts or shopping, especially in the supermarket are fundamentally social and mostly an act of love.

Think about the main shopper, rushing around the aisles. The list has been carefully put together mostly thinking about others. Not just what the kids like, increasingly tough love, what is good for them. There's the pressure to deliver much loved familiarity but also variation, surprise and delight.

It can be argued that  budget pressured families are MORE materialistic than luxury laden well off folks, it's they who fret over stuff like children's birthday parties - the right birthday outfit and gift matter more when you can barely afford them. Just as brand cereal can be seen as much bigger sign of loving your children than 'compromising' on own label. It's why people with the least earning power tend to display the biggest logos...and tend to be the most snobby.

It's there in clothes shopping. Even those who claim to buy to please themselves are picturing a series of social situations and what the clothes might convey. Few men get that women dress for other women, and this points to the fact that many women are closer to their friends than their male partners - are at least share very different things.

Would be interesting to do a study on online shopping, but I suspect the same sort of principles apply. Might bring up even more importance to integrating social media with shopping.

Anyway.

 

 

Why good brands are like chilli

I was reading here why we really like Chilli.

It's less to do with taste and smell and more about as, as yet, hard to define third set of receptors that are mostly about touch. We don't taste chilli as much as feel it, our mouths think they are feeling actual heat.

Which brings me to my beloved tea, where the astringent properties of the tannins work on the 'feel' senses, not just the taste ones.

I always knew tea was better than coffee, now I have proof.

Also. in a shameless segue into brand stuff, this is how really good brands work. Above the obvious stuff that folks report in research, the best brands just feel better - an indescribable 'feel sense' which is where I struggle with Byron Sharpe.

When folks can't describe what's different about their claimed favourite brand, it's not as he claims just because they don't really have a preference, it's because they can't really describe a vague fuzzy feeling. It's just feels better. Or it doesn't.

Just like most of use can't describe why we really like chilli. We just do.

 

Call to arms for planning folk

Back in 2003 I was at an APG lecture that was pretty compelling. It was basically a call to arms for a role for good planning in the modern age.

Except that modern age looks a bit antiquated. Talk was of websites and blogs as the future. Facebook was mostly unheard off, no one had smartphones (although people were talking about the death of TV and the end of paid for ads, some things never change I guess).

The premise was that if you go back to the time of Henry Ford and his 'you can have any colour as long as it's black' it was easy for the advertiser. We had, if anything under-supply. One commercial TV channel in the UK, lack of choice on the supermarket shelf, bored people looking for novelty. Planning media and advertising was easy - reach people on the obvious channels, tell them a product benefit, mix in a little emotion. You're done.

Fast forward to 2003 and were already making too much stuff. Multiples of the same thing on supermarket shelves, hundreds of TV channels. Roughly 3,000 ad messages fired at the average person per day.

A call for smartness to become the brand that got noticed and wanted in the avalanche of advertising.

Now let's go to the present day. Not just even more hundreds of TV channels, video consumption on every device you can think of, gaming overtaking film and TV as entertainment in some quarters, dark social leading to a whole generation finally able to block out brands and prying adults very soon. Precision advertising with programmatic, re-targeting and stuff that is beginning to wear thing with the recent Google scandal, the estimate that programmatic reaches perhaps 1/3 of the supposed paid inventory and the dumbness of re-targeting that sees you being served as ad for the thing you bought an hour ago.

Then there is ability to buy whatever you want wherever you want, where spontaneity might matter more than creating a slow burn of long term desire, where people can decide on what to buy based on each other rather than an authority, where we're making so much stuff, real and virtual that realness of paper and the need for mindfulness mean colouring books for grown ups are big business.

And yet the response from most advertising and brand advice suppliers is to try and re-badge the past without learning from. The same hollow arguments on what a brand model might look like these days, when business has changed so much, perhaps the golden rule of building a strong brand and then adding scale might actually be going into reverse. Where advertorials are re hashed as Native and somehow it's cool to be ashamed that you have something great to sell and pretend not to be advertising at all, where agencies fight over roles by re-branding advertising as content, where the need to fuse media planning and creative planning (not as different as folks might think is lost as agencies compete over 'comms planning' media agencies invent 'ideation teams' and creative agencies invent stuff like Media Arts so they can force the media agencies to go back to putting an 'x' on a schedule.

You might say the future looks bleak. But I say that's wrong.

In a market where where there's too much stuff, brands, agencies, channels, theories, process and everything else. Where no one knows what they're doing. With some ignoring to the learnings of the past, from pioneers like Stephen King, Gossage, and yes Rosser Reeves, or even modern folks like John Steele. While others fail to embrace change, new challenges and new opportunities thrown up by culture.

This market has never been more ready for folks who can marry invention with best practice. Blend logic and emotion. Borrow from the new and old. Planners I mean.

There's so much adwank (and digiwank to be even more precise) flying around, sheer common sense can take you very far.

But there's also so much trying to cling to the past that re-inventing the familiar can be perhaps more propelling.

It's human nature to be contradictory. We cling to the familiar while going ga ga for novelty. The sweet spot perhaps has always been innovation done in a way that looks safe.

Or safe in a way that looks interesting.

Either way, it was a time for planners in 2003, perhaps that time is even more ripe now.

I think it's exciting to be around in advertising these days.

Advertising, let's be proud of that word. That would be a nice start.

Plan on.

Killer Questions that don't get asked enough in meetings

Meetings are tough, especially if you're a little shy like I am. Let's face it,this industry (and western business culture at large) seems to gravitate to the confident, eloquent charismatic type, no matter how inadequate their logic or ideas might be.

As always, it's not about the best ideas, it's about people wanting to buy them from you.

There is a way to cut through these situations though. It's the killer question, quietly asked when there is an eventual pause.

One of the best is simply 'What is this brand actually for'. Used to maximum effect in brand babbler meetings, where you've got folks prattling esoteric theory and four page manifestos. The dual nature of this question allows you expose the fact that most brand babblers don't really know how people USE a product, what it means to them or anything like that. Of course, brands having a wider cultural enthusiasm or emotional role is important, but it's got to be linked to the bloody real world. Even if there is real need to define the emotional, cultural territory, it's amazing how many people can't get that down a sentence. I don't mean brand onions, I mean a compression of lots of brand potential, purpose, possibility and genuine human need. For example, all the lovely old Spice Work came from 'Old Spice Gets You Experience'.

An alternative to this, if you've the ugly twin the emotional 'brand babbler' is the rational product benefit peddler. Ask them, 'What business are we really in?'. It's a bit common, but still useful to open the conversation.

Another one that's common, but amazingly not common enough, which is a killer in all agency meetings where there is some squabbling over comms strategy is simply, 'What is the objective?'. This works really well also, when you have creative folks and ad tweaking planners who have crafted a strategy that's really about ground breaking advertising, but won't deal with any fundamental issues that are stopping people buying. Works well when people are trying to fix a brand rather than a business.

Another version is 'What problem are solving here?' This works really well when a strategy type has been exposed too late to a project and a mountain of brilliant work has been done that you can see straight away is all wrong. Works amazingly well when you're in a meeting where the lead agency is a digital agency, a PR agency or, dare Is say it, a media agency. Respectively, clicks, column inches or CPM are not objectives, they're hygiene factors. That goes for creative agencies too - recall, persuasion scores, cut-through etc are things you just do. 

This question can also save you from yourself. Instead of blundering into a projecting you haven't thought about enough yet, or falling for your own preconceptions of what the answer should be, this gives you time to think and other the best possible chance of explaining.

What's the budget? Should be the first question that gets asked, but rarely us.

A real killer when it comes to reviewing content (stuff you choose to watch rather than ads you have to watch or block to get media cheaper,) ideas to spark co-creation, or amazingly high effort tasks to enter promotional competitions, fantastical experiential stuff, is simply, "Would you do it? Would you be interested". Because 90% of the time you couldn't be bothered and nor would anyone else. People in advertising like to think they work in art, cinema or Apple. We don't, we work in advertising. It's really hard to 'not do advertising' and make people care.

These are the killer ones for me. There are others, many are variations of the above, and a score or more tactical ones for a variety of situations.

Another reason to ask questions by the way, rather than telling folks what you think, is that you might the one who is totally in the wrong.

Put more sneakily, when you may on the side of correctness, it's far easier to drill holes in the logic of someone who speaks first, rather than sticking your neck out.

This where some questions that are not questions can help.

Unfairly compress what they said,"So is what your saying that...."

Pick out one flaw in mostly sound point to overturn the whole thing, "Could you help understand the one thing unclear on.."

Or even go all out and go head on,"Could help me understand why is is that (insert you're thinking and compare it to theirs, then ask why it's different).

of course I'm not wholly recommending the cunning routes. I still think the best way to success is to be nice and honest where you can. But sometimes you simply can't bring a knife to a gun fight.

 

The rules of working with partner agencies

Always tricky this, especially in the days when clients like to work with a collective of different specialists. There is no such thing as handbook, but the unwritten rules are legion.

1. Under no circumstances should you offer a direct opinion on a partner agency's work in a client meeting, even if they are not there. If the work is really bad, you don't ever say how bad it is, not only might the client have talked to agency already and really like it, meaning you're criticising the client, you can be rest assured said agency will take their beating with good grace, then wait for the precise opportunity to return the favour with a very sharp knife in the back. If it's really good, you still have the client problem where they might secretly hate it......and if the client likes it, don't make then love it too much, you have your own work you want them to like too. If a client asks you direct, if it's awful, damn it with faint praise. If it's great, find a weakness in it, sow a seed of doubt in the client's mind by picking a small element of the work and praising it...but in way that gives the client second thoughts. Same strategy really,"Really like the bravery of the casting". "Great the media plan is sticking by YouTube despite the recent news on safety".
2. Do people favours. If you want people to do stuff for you, do something for them first. Works in everyday life, works in agency life. Work out what the partner agency really wants, work out how you can help. Just make sure it's something they really want that's neither here nor there to you. You would be amazed if you work in a media agency how much data the creative agency hasn't got. Creative agency types don't realise how bored media planners are, that's why they try and muscle in on creative work, it's because it's far more interesting that deciding where to put the 'x' on an Excel spreadsheet - throw them bone to make them feel they're involved in the creative process...etc, etc.
3. Give it a new name if you want to do a land-grab. There's a blur these days between what agency does what. Officially, that's to do with required new approaches thanks to changes in consumer behaviour. In reality, agencies have been really good at re-branding bits of media and creative so they can steal it from partner agencies. For example, no one does creative work apart from the creative agency, and no one fills up the 'paid media' apart from the ad or digital agency. So media folks hit on the idea of 'content'. From this comes new species like 'content partnerships', or stuff which doesn't quite feel like 'paid for ads'. Content is totally up for grabs. Just like 'advertorials' used to be done by the ad agency, but 'native' content can be done by anyone. It's like 'media planning' is done by the media agency, but 'communications planning' can be done by anyone. Communications planning can also be a new name for brand planning, so suddenly, leading strategy can be done by anyone, depending on what you call and it and what you think the new name means. There's even more exotic agency processes like 'Media Arts' or 'The Demand Chain' which are just genius - no one has a clue what on earth these things are so you can use them to grab any part of the client budget you like. 'Digital strategy' is another of these. Because digital strategy is really a part of overall strategy, it can be done by anyone and be a powerful tool to steal as much client business and you can. Just like 'anything between the consumer and brand is media, so we have the right to have a point of view on everything'. If you're bored just doing 'media' make media mean something else.
4. Let them Run Out of Steam All agency meetings are like watching children play football, they just can't help themselves chase the ball. Everybody wants to talk first, usually cutting against each other, building to passive aggressive verbal dodgeball. Eventually everyone runs out of steam, or forgets what they were talking about. This is where you step in with a dose of intelligent common sense.
5. But Timing is Everything Of course, sometimes you are up against some brilliant operators. if you're not careful, they'll deftly control the agenda, always moving it on before there is any real conclusion, in order to post rationalise the whole meeting later. For this kind of slippery beast you need to have one killer point to make, and one alone. You'll have to interrupt, but you can only interrupt once. Start it with, "What I'd like to understand is.....". Or even better, "Who wants a coffee". Before anyone has a chance to kick off again, post drink, jump in with, "I've been thinking about that last point and......" No agency folk can resist coffee..............
6. Always supply excellent tea and coffee. The above point means you need to pay people the respect of having stuff folks want to drink. That doesn't mean the space age Ipad coffee machines at places like Twitter, not does it mean a £1,000 espresso maker, or even offering lattes. Tea made in warmed pot, ideally with Yorkshire Tea. Coffee made with freshly ground beans, served in a french press. You can tell a lot about people by how they make drinks, and if they serve biscuits. It's worth treating people well, because when you have all sorts of people on your patch, you can have lots of little conversations, the stuff that actually gets stuff done. Some of that is getting a little extra time with the client, but there is more...........
7. Many conversations, less meetings. Let's be clear, due to much of the above, very little gets done in all agency meetings. If you're lucky, a few things get agreed. In fact, there is usually an unspoken pact to make sure little gets done or agreed. Just like the back room skulduggery that decides most government policy, in any country, like 'sofa government' in the Tony Blair era here in the UK, 'sofa planning' is where things really get decided. Like the inner cabal of most governments, most inter agency groups have a shadowy group who really decide things. In many cases, this group does not include representatives from every agency, indeed, this happens rarely. It is critical you get yourself into this inner circle. Another reasons to watch not just the workings of the meetings, but the flow of how things get communicated and signed off in between. Signed off plans, budgets and whatever sometimes seem to 'emerge'. Only after the event do you find out about a critical call with a client. This means careful forensic work to understand where these alliances lie. Then decipher the means to break into this invisible world. Mostly, that means being not only exceptionally talented and sensible, it also means observing most of the above rules and 'not being a dick'. Then you'll suddenly find yourself having a chat over coffee on the way back to the tube, or chatting in a taxi and, in five minutes, agreeing what wasn't concluded in four hours of agenda points. Sometimes you'll find the secret society really doesn't want new members and it's all sewn up though, this is when you need to pull in the 'do people a favour rule'.
8. Don't get emotional. Psychologists have long known that people make every different decisions when they are emotionally stimulated. Pure arousal makes us do all sorts of stuff and there is a breed of flirty agency suit who is brilliant and making you feel like the only person in the world (either sex I hasten to add). Next thing you know, you've surrendered your budget for some madcap awards chasing caper, or being roped in to delivering bad news to the client that's only bad news to the partner agency, until now that is. There's the brilliant clever planner whom the client loves who calls for a catch up - you're pathetically grateful to be treated as an equal and come off the call you've given away all sorts of thinking and secrets, in exchange for knowing what the caller had for lunch. Just as there are partner agencies (hi Mother) who trade on being quite good, but mostly one being very very cool. Like the characters in The Devil Wears Prada, this means being rude to everyone. It's very easy to get annoyed at people who stare out of the window when you're talking, or deliberately goad you, but you make the very worse decisions when you are angry. And end up looking stupid.
9. Learn the Lingo. Marketing speak is a disease. However, like the common cold, it isn't curable, only the healthiest can mostly stave it off. Every agency group has it's own language and codes. Don't say a bloody thing until you've sat in few meetings and worked it out. The really good groups, and clients, can't be bothered with this, and you'll find the babblers are outside of the 'cabal'. However, in the less righteous groups, the babble happens in the meetings and the common sense only commences in the cabal. Know which is which.
10. Write the Contact Report. No one likes doing this. But the smart agency knows what was agreed in meeting didn't happen unless it's captured in the contact report. You can't change the outcome of a meeting but you can bend it to your will with careful writing. History is written by the winners, but with contact reports, you can win by writing the history.
11. Trust No One. Don't expect anyone to do what they promised to do, even if they're name is against an action the contact report. Don't expect them to get it right, just expect them to blame you when it goes tits up. So politely do people a favour and make sure they're doing what they promised. Take the initiative.
12. Clients are not parents. Squabbling kids are bad at home. Clients can't be bothered to deal with warring agencies. Secretly they quite like some competition, but only if it keeps everyone on their game. No matter how much you hate each other's guts, no matter how much you've fallen out, never EVER let the client see it. Just like they don't expect to organise projects and make sure stuff happens between meetings.
13. Love your lead agency. Being lead agency is a double edged sword. Yes, you get more fee and decide the overall shape of the campaign, but it's also down to you to make other agencies play nicely and make everything happens. It also means that if you decide everything, you get blamed when it all goes wrong. So sometimes just be grateful to be a junior partner, be told what to do,take your fee and move on with your life. What doesn't work is trying to take the lead when it's not your agreed role. Not only will you fall out with the folks who have a closer client relationship that you, if it goes wrong, it's your fault and you didn't get paid for the additional responsibility.
14. Be Patient. If you fancy being lead agency, but you're not, play the long game. Only if the lead agency are there because of great results rather than relationships (hi Mother). No matter how good they are, eventually they'll mess up. The nice people who people like, usually survive this, the hipper Devil Wears Prada folks get fired.It's another reason to not rise to inter agency rudeness, if you are not owed any favours, if no one wants you to do well, one false move and you're out. If people are brilliant AND lovely though, I can't and won't help you....we need nice people to do well in this business, enjoy working with nice people that are probably teaching you something...........
15. Steal generously. I learned more working with partner agencies than I ever did internally. That's nothing against the people I've worked for (mostly) it's rather that when you go into situations not just wanting to win and believing everyone else to be inferior, you pick up all sorts of knowledge, approaches and bits of insight from a wider mix of folks. I'm not very clever and have recycled a presentation from a certain partner agency from a few years ago at least once a year. They know this and enjoy the fact it's done some good.The thinking is my own, the approach is theirs. Let them steal from you too, be generous with your ideas, eventually you'll find them quoting you in meetings and stuff, even better, people they know will want to hire you.
16. Do the table push-back. Sometimes you are dealing with bell ends. No matter how you try to help, they push on regardless. Let them hang themselves with the rope you've given them. Body language here is essential. If you know the client will violently hate what they're presenting, as soon as they start on the intro, get all of your team, and hopefully your other partners, so push away from the table and all sit back. Be as still as gnomes. The client will get you wanted no part of this, but were too grown up to make a bun fight of it. This is especially true of new agencies that want to make their mark (see point 7 about cabals) - make sure you're not that new agency. If you see the 'push-back' when you're talking, it's time to over do the favours bit.
17. Never ever change another agency's deck. In many cases, one agency will sort the slides on a joint agency presentation. Don't change a thing, it's just the way it is.
18. Pay. On all agency nights out, always get your round. Never be the one to go home first, unless you know drinking will make you lose your cool (see point 8) Take your turn buying lunch, take your turn to host too, it's worth it (see point 6)
19. Be nice, life really is too short.
20. It's not fair, toughen the hell up. Your best ideas will get cast aside in the final all agency plan. You'll have to surrender budget to some over thought madcap idea. You'll have been saying the same thing for weeks, then in walks the creative director from another agency on a one off visit, who says the same thing and then it gets bought. Or the media agency brings in someone from Channel 4 and you find your script destroyed in favour of 'content'. Like any uneasy alliance, no one wins completely, sometimes you lose. The best you can hope for, is that by being patient, even handed, self aware and just that little bit sneaky, you mostly win most of the time by trying to help everyone mostly win most of the time. In other words, it's rarely fair, get used to it. It's easy to get frustrated, it's easy to lose your cool. It's hard to play a longer, game, but that's the secret.

Spontaneous thinking is years in the making.

If you like food, you'd love my eldest sister. She's one of those people who can look at a few leftovers in the fridge and turn them into an experience to make your tastebuds weep with joy. She never used recipes, even for precise baking, she just makes it up as she goes along.

Or at least it looks that way.

Just like Roger Federer's tennis looks fluid, intuitive and effortless, when it's the result of hours and hours of relentless practice, to the point when he doesn't really think about his forehand, his footwork or his service action, it just happens.

It's the same with my sister. Do you remember Matilda? The precocious Roald Dahl little girl who had read Dickens' back catalogue by the age of four? My eldest sister used to sneak out of bed at 5am and make a chocolate cake before everyone got up at the age of five. Years and years of learning the subtlety of how ingredients work together, the chemistry that makes a sauce thicken at a precise point, knowing when a steak is precisely medium rare. She's got it all stored in her brain and, with all that rigourous knowledge there, all the techniques and natural as breathing, she can invent at will.

Planning is like that really. When I started out I was told it takes five years to really get to grips to working on strategy with confidence, be that media, brand, comms or anything else (and are they really that seperate or is this fed by agencies with different fees to justify?). Seven years to find your own distinctive voice.

Because there is just too much to know and absorb, to many connections to make. Not just the pivotal observation that unites category, brand, product (yes, they are not the same thing), customers and culture...and that's hard enough.

The really good strategy unites the sensibilities of what the client tends to buy, the agenda behind their business as a whole, the agency direction and 'brand' (it's there like it or not), the characteristics of the suits, the kind of work the creative team tends to do and how they like to be briefed, the motivations of partner agencies, the buying preferences of the investment teams in the media agency, what deals have been made, the fact you can't touch Google for a few months right now.

Then there is the really excellent strategy that brings in all that reading and reference you ceaselessly do. Anthropology, psychology, reference from all sorts of cultural touchpoints. For example, you might now that only 2% of UK people believe health claims made by food brands, but then it's worth knowing that humans never believe facts unless you make them emotionally want to believe it - and if you are targeting teenagers, you're more likely to persuade them if you acknowledge they are most influenced by the most popular kid in class, which them makes sense of engaging with Vloggers...as long as you know young folks watch far more TV than YouTube, so you'll need to use them in mainstream media.

You get the picture.

In other words, while creative thinking techniques etc are great to help you get ideas, it all boils down to hard work unfortunately. Doing this for long enough to get to a point where you're always thinking without thinking.

Which is also why my sister finds it hard to share recipes, she's got to a point where she can't explain it, she just does it.

That's actually the point of strategy templates, briefing forms and powerpoint type stuff. Unlike my sister, a planner isn't any good just coming with business building thinking, they need to not explain it to other folks, they need to make them desperate to bring it to life.

Churchill once said his best spontaneous quips had been worked on days, maybe weeks before. It's like I'm afraid, creative thinking and breakthrough ideas are not about sitting on beanbags drinking coffee and having a lovely time. Genius is bloody, rigorous hard work and years of training.

Bugger

What Confucious has to do with your life, brands and particle physics.

I read The Path recently. It's worth a look, basically a summary of Chinese philosophy and what it means for us today.

Confucious etc.

Some things to think about:

Every generation thinks they're special. Today's West thinks it came first with experiments on freedom of thought and self determination. We were not. This has a lot of relevance for the day job, where everyone thinks everything is newer and better and so different to years gone by. Well, you can call it Native of you want, back in the day, we called them 'Advertorials'.

Humans don't make that many decisions alone. Most of how we behave depends on how we interact with others, most of our habits and those things we say are 'just the way we are' came from the result on interactions with folks at a particular point in our lives. So don't research the person, research the connections between people. If you want to change behaviour, change the interactions.

We think of ourselves, brands too, as fixed objects, some sort of innate self and identity. We have this thing about being authentic and 'finding ourselves'. Just as you mess with the brand onion at your peril. But actually you make your own luck, you construct your identity every single day, subtly altering with the sheer density of events and interactions. Which means you can control your own destiny if you focus on the very small and look at changing that. Just as a brand needs to evolve over time, in way that's only noticed if one bothers to look back. You don't realise the Coke can has changed massively over the last 30 years until you look back to how it was.

Physicists today are increasingly convinced that particles don't really 'exist' until they interact with something else. We are made up therefore of trillions of sub-atomic interactions. Turns out, it's useful to think about that in general life as well as brands.

It's less useful to think of yourself of the brand you work on as a fixed 'thing' but rather an evolving picture made of thousands, millions of interactions with other people.

Moves on the boring 'brand as person' metaphor maybe, to brand as 'as human interactions'.

Or perhaps, Pointillism.

Icebergs and Agencies

I found out last week there is such as thing as iceberg watching as a job. There is a funded, shadowy collective, paid to monitor the world's icebergs for anything about to cause a Titanic-esque shipping catastrophe etc.

I don't know how many catastrophes they've averted, but that's sort of the point, if they do their job, we shouldn't know they exist.

It's like the unsung heroes in agency world. Production, traffic, operations. In media world, there's Ad Ops and sometimes the corner of the insight team that does nothing but TGI runs, Touchpoints Google Trends.

Like the cycling soigneurs, or the aforementioned iceberg watchers, without these folks things would just crumble, but you only appreciate them when they're no longer there, or notice them when things go wrong. 

The benefits of working for owners that like what they do more than money (but tend to have a couple of quid as a result)

This Video of a Do Lectures talk is well worth your attention.

Basically, it's about the merits of building a company you don't want to sell.

It's obviously worth it if you are thinking of starting an agency, from those 'what if' conversations you have with people you trust and like, to getting serious and looking for a business loan. 

When you look at the best independent outfits, one thing that always stands out is how much they genuinely love what they're doing. The money comes of course, but it comes by a focus on being relentlessly great (and having a decent financial director) rather than thinking about when you'll sell. Many of these places sell on to successors rather than BDA's (big dumb agencies).

When you look at the best offices in larger groups, they tend to love it too, rather than just the corporate dollar or the vanilla proprietary process. They toes the line of course, they do the numbers, but enthusiasm drives rather than money. Consequently, they're not short of a couple of quid.

As long as, that is, there are some grown ups in the mix as well. An FD who is both mindful of the bottom line and the overall direction of the organisation is a very valuable asset indeed.

When you start taking on pitches because the Eye of Sauron in Morder demands you reach your income target come what may, or you start selling clients stuff they don't need, or you have to fall in line with the group and keep your staff to income ratio precise, it's a slippery slope. Purely money based decisions tend to cost you in the long term. It's funny, when the industry is busy persuading clients to invest in long term metrics and not just clicks and quarterly results, just how short term we can be ourselves.

It's important when you work out what kind of place you want to work at too. Some brilliant agencies work the longest hours, maybe because the people there like it too much and don't get enough work like balance. It depends on what you want. If you want to do the best work of your life, this kind of place should be for you.

Other places tend to be human and focus on the people AND the work - I include my place in this. Especially good for people a little bit older or if you're thinking of being a parent. Just maybe, it's good for decent agency folk, if you only do advertising 24/7 your not likely to be able to chime with the hearts and minds of the customers you're paid to influence.

To be honest, it's amazing how much a task can expand to fill whatever the culture deems to be a working day. Just as it's amazing how much bollocks agencies can put into their client presentations to justify an over-inflated fee, or paper over the fact that every presentation is the same because the question is something like 'How do we make this Disruptive?' 'Have we had the five Media Arts Conversations yet' or 'What's the Demand Chain'.

Of course, some people like to be be in politics, diplomacy or the civil service, rather than advertising. If so, corporate focused organisations might be for you!

Granstanding V native

I saw a workshop structure recently from a creative agency.

It was nice and simple which was a good start.

The premise was based on the accepted wisdom that people don’t respond to advertising anymore. Let’s gloss over that shall we?

On one hand, the argument went, we’re seeing brands grandstanding – you know, big event advertising that grabs the attention like it or not.

Like what Sony seem to be doing with colour again, all these years after they gave up trying to replicate balls. Or the Cadbury Gorilla.

Both pieces of advertising worked of course, that’s why folks in marketing go on about them now. At least Sony is based on a product truth, although any brand could talk about the colour quality of their telly. Cadbury was about making people feel the brand benefit…joy, but I doubt anyone understood this apart from the folks who had to write the awards.

On the other hand, we’re seeing brands going all ‘native’. Busy infiltrating editorial, getting into the timeline without getting noticed too much…and therefore, not really being remembered too much. So the workshop structure was based on marrying what the brand was about to what people care about….getting noticed but in way people would be bothered about.

Are we really in a world when it’s a proprietary process to make sure you convey something about the brand but reward the audience in some way? When did repackaging common sense become so pervasive? You’ll get ‘talking head’ planners in the press talking about ‘adding to what folks care about’. Too right.

That shouldn’t be news. This is not innovative thinking.

Surely. It should be standard that if you’re doing a sponsorship of football, make sure you’re adding to the experience of football. I you’re paying to reach people on Facebook, respect and add to that context.

If you’re interrupting peoples’ evening telly with an ad, make it worthwhile. That starts with admitting you’re selling something and then making it rewarding enough to appreciate the experience.

Yes, sometimes infiltrating the culture is the right thing to do. But really, it’s about infiltrating the heart to infiltrate the head. So often, common sense gets maligned in the service of a soundbite. Right now, folks are publicly disagreeing with lots of Byron Sharpe stuff. Which is great, received wisdom is the enemy.

But not when it’s based on twisting the words, or even worse, just not getting it. For example, I read about a war between Sharpe’s arguments for ‘salience’ v ‘brand love’. The premise was that salience is simply getting noticed through populism and getting noticed, being distinctive, ‘grandstanding’.

When Sharpe himself has shown that salience is about getting in the head in as many reasons to buy the category as you can. It’s just that you don’t get in the head if you don’t get noticed, and you don’t get in the head if you don’t activate the emotions, which get recalled for longer.

It’s just that love is a crap catch all for being remembered for provoking an emotional reaction that is relevant for what the business needs to achieve.

One thing I don’t agree with Mr Sharpe is this…. He reckons folks can’t tell you why the brands they buy are different. Too right. I can’t tell you why my wife is different, but she leaves a precise emotional imprint on me that feels like no one else. Nike feels different to Adidas, even if few people can say quite how or why.

Ladies and gents, I give you the dear departed David Abbot. The best copywriter who said, ‘Say something about the product in a way that cannot be missed’.

Sometimes you’re task is to be more in tune with the lives of your buyers. Sometimes you’re task is to educate them. Sometimes your task is to get as many people talking about you as you can. But it’s always to create an intangible feeling and be relevant.

Common sense never goes out of fashion.

The Only Review of 2016 you'll ever need

Don't you just love it when clever people come up with new buzz words.

Like 'post-truth'.

Facts in politics and wider life matter less and less. Trump lied, Farage lied, Boris lied.

But the think is, George Osborne lied with his 'emergency budget', or at best, over-claimed. As did most economists who predicted an immediate, catastrophic recession.

Hillary did some questionable stuff with emails, however this fact was used and distorted.

So yes, it's true that Facebook probably helped people see untruths and believe them for facts.

But boil it all down and it's really simple. If 2017 was some sort of tipping point, it's only this:

Technology has heightened a constant truth. Facts are never enough, you need to make people want to believe them and you need to make it simple. 

Post truth isn't a thing, it's just made not bothering to persuade people next to impossible.

We believe people like us more than others, is just that modern media has created a more closed echo chamber.

If you can tap into a real tension, need, enthusiasm or anger in a credible way, it's the most powerful thing you can do. Corbyn, Trump, Farage, Sanders, all different, all captured the imagination of people so angry and frustrated, that anyone who sounded like they were doing something about it and talked like them (even a billionnaire, Old Etonian and Stockbroker) would be believed and loved, no matter what the detail.

This blog doesn't do politics, which is why it's pointed out white lies from opposing 'sides'. I just want you to take this away:

If you work on a brand, as always, emotion and culture far outweigh facts.

They always have, it's just that, more than ever, you need to make people like you if they're going to listen.

But don't try and bullshit anyone either, no one will want to believe a brand they way they want to believe Trump, what we do just isn't important enough.

And, as always, go out and meet your audience, there has never been more risk you'll mistake them as people that think like you do.

Happy New year.

It's never been more important to look after your people

I'll never forget a comment from former boss in 2008. "I like recessions, it means you can squeeze more out your people".

I'll let you decide on the moral implications of that comment.

But from a more practical perspective, while young people feel they have a strong work ethic, the pay and predictability of working in any kind of agency means it's just not the attraction it once was.

You have to be sure you like working with colourful, you have to like variety and not want to know precisely what you're doing this afternoon, let alone tomorrow. And, as The Rules State, you have to toughen up. Feedback is freely given, deadlines and changes of direction mean there will be out of hours working and stress, that's the job, that's the way it is.

So it needs to be as fun, interesting and fulfilling as possible.

Not made harder.

It's also the job of management to make sure their people are happy, that there is no unnecessary stress and people are allowed to flourish in their own way.

That wasn't the case with this boss and the organisation, which is why it's crawling into obsolescence. It was a place where your face had to fit, where the only way of doing things was One Way, and working 12 hour days was a badge of pride and a way to get acceptance, rather than an admission of not being efficient.

That won't cut it today, and, underneath the rubbish about the death of advertising etc, is why many creative agencies are not the robust species they used to be....they only get to hire one kind of person, the kind mad enough to give up their lives for work. That kind of person is rarer and rarer, and not that good at creativity, as ideas come from drawing new connections between a mind full of experiences and references, not trying a new variety of the same approach.

Our people are our best asset.

Simples.

 

Marginal gains

You may have heard the phrase 'marginal gains'.

It's something folks in cycling use a lot, where you micro manage the detail, so lots of little changes add up to a whole lot of difference.

It's kind of like Pointillism of you like your metaphors - where the school of painting led by Pisarro etc created a style of painting where the imagery is created by painstakingly building up a series of dots (centuries before pixels).

I had this kind of thing going on when I was swimming, you would not believe the difference pointing your hand down, keeping it nice and stiff, makes when your hand enters the water on the freestyle stroke.

But it can work in reverse. I've had all sorts of problems in my knee after cycling thousands of miles with seat set forward about 10 mm too far. No impact over a few miles, but over the time, a little has become lot and the resulting left glute weakness (in relation to the right) has caused all sorts of problems. 10 mm, that's all.

Now, I'll talk to you about a little discussion I had with a creative over a press ad a few years back. I wouldn't back down over three minor points with the headline and the copy. Because it didn't make watertight sense.

The response I got was, "But people don't analyse ads the way we do, it doesn't matter". I was a bit shocked, as I have grown up with good creatives who pick up work, tear it to bits and shake it around until nothing loose falls out.

But anyway, he actually proved my point. People don't spend time with ads, if they don't feel right, they won't bother to work out why, they'll move on.

But I let it go. It was the first developed execution in a campaign. When they tried to work up the other scamps, they got into all sorts of mess, those little loose threads became gaping holes.

This is why best in class comms planning is essential. It's not good having amazing big ideas, if you haven't worked out what you need to do to bring them to life - the barriers to making it work, the key things that need to happen. Look at this to see what I mean http://www.slideshare.net/juliancole/what-is-comms-planning

It's why another way to get good ideas is to have lots of observations about things, then look for the links and try and recombine them. Ideas are really recombinations  of existing stuff. Big flashes of insight are hard, but hard work is actually easier.

I'm saying that big ideas are fine, but we should celebrate the people who make them actually work and make sure everything is watertight before we go too far.

Otherwise a little hole can become a gaping chasm.

I guess I'm saying the big ideas people are essential, but so are the details folk that br

What Star Wars means for brands and stuff

My little children are getting into Star Wars. For someone who was brought up in the 70s and 80s this is an intense joy.

To misquote a couple of lines from Fever Pitch, there isn't anything that many people have loved for over thirty years as consistently as some people my age have loved Star Wars.

If anyone needs to learn how to earn disproportionate attention and measure of loyalty from people, looking at Star Wars is actually a good place to start. Both in terms of what to do do, and what not. Not to mention the things you shouldn't bother to attempt.

1. Create something totally jaw-droppingly different - the moment in a New Hope when the Star Destroyer first thunders onto the screen is not something they were ever able to repeat. The sheer shock and awe of it completely captured the imagination. It's the same with advertising these days, your first job is to get noticed.
2. But don't think you'll ever create a Star Destroyer moment. An Old Spice guy comes around once a blue moon. In fact, so does a Star Destroyer moment. Movies that really succeed seer themselves in the collective psyche. Ads that succeed manage to get noticed and remembered for something.
3. But stand on the shoulders of giants - George Lucas was smart and borrowed from World War 2 dog fights, Darth Vader's suits was based on Samurai armour.
4. But if you don't engage the heart, forget it - arguably, there was more action, more effects, more everything in the 'prequels' but they're hated by most original fans because they forgot to put any relatable humanity, let alone a sense of humour.
5. Never forget what you do best - because it was the characters that people loved. not just the shock and awe. The original characters were funny, has real relationships, you had Han Solo with a twinkle in his eye and feisty Princess Leia. Always build from what buyers already like about you, don't try and make it what YOU want it to be. A certain hair care brand I worked on desperately wanted people to love them as a fashion icon, when actually they loved as a brand that really understood women. By associating themselves with stick thin, sulky models they just put people off! If you are a brand and you lose your way, it's so much harder to come back. People were willing Star Wars to be good, no one REALLY wants a brand to reclaim it's former glory. That wasn't the case for WISPA before you mention it by the way, that was just a meme that took on a life of it's own.
6. But challenge your audience - The Empire Strikes Back threw the first film back in our faces and let the bad guys in, not to mention the ultimate curve ball and created one of the biggest entertainment surprises ever  -"Luke, I am your father".
7. Keep your core but move with the times - JJ Abrams maybe went a bit too far with this. On top of very human characters, some great humour and icons like the Falcon, X Wings Tie fighters and whatever, you still got the unknown character on desert planet thrown into a quest by accident. You got the planer sized weapon they had to destroy at the end. But then again, you had the strong female lead to reflect how we live today, the vulnerable conflicted male lead, even the sad older characters reflecting on loss and what might have been.
8. Don't be afraid to leave space for the audience - let's be clear, people want to work out who Rey's parents are, they don't want to work out what your ad is about, but the best work still let's the audience translate and work out stuff a little bit. We don't like culture spoon-fed anymore. No one really knew if Darth Vader was a robot or what in the first film, certainly in the first hour. It's more so these days - who the hell is Snoke? Where did Rey come from? How did Ren convert? La di dah.
9. Create different levels for different buyers. I have never read a Star Wars book, but I'm interested enough to have found out the background on Palpatine's origins. Others have read hundreds of books, commented on forums, gone to conventions. Most of the money comes from a long tail of people who just watch the films and buy a few toys for their kids. Other kids will only use Star Wars characters on Disney Infinity. I don't totally buy the Byron Sharpe stuff that growth just comes from light buyers and that it's weak awareness. I also think it's about intense emotion that gets encoded into the memory - triggers that come up from the subconscious at the right time. You can get people to buy more if their frequency is really low, if you build emotional presence. I can't tell you really why Nike is different, but I can tell you it feels different and has come from years of emotional build up. Anyway, in both cases, aim for mass popularity, but enable folks to go further. In the case of the Force Awakens, the geeks (and semi geeks) went to the first showing and that sense of 'the hardcore fans like it, so it must be good enough to bother' meant the rest followed. Most brands simply feel okay to buy, much of that these days comes from seeing other people buying and following suit.
10. Respect your audience. Let's be honest, lots of children liked the prequels, many liked Jar Jar Binks, but the overall discourse was that they weren't any good. George didn't care,"This is the story I want to tell". Sometimes when they say they want a faster horse, well, you should listen.
11. Remove reasons not to buy. Star Wars rebels the cartoon is great, my kids loves it (to Evie the new movie is 'Star Wars Rebels the Force Awakens). The latest Clone Wars series is amazing, and amazingly builds on the prequels. In both cases you've got Darth Maul, who fans actually loved. Star Wars doing TV well should have been a no brainer, the increased revenue, the increased presence. Just as McDonalds needed to do salads and chicken to defend against health foods and KFC. Just as soft drinks need to diversify into sugar free and more adult versions to keep market share.

Anyway.

The Rules of Pitching

If you haven't read John Steele's Perfect Pitch yet, you should. It's really good and there is something to learn for everyone.

But it has a fatal flaw, as do most marketing type books, it exists in the land of perfect.Or at least the land where you have three months and unlimited research budget. He's candid that process is a myth, and the killer idea comes out of the ether at some point.

But still, it's to get real. In a follow on from The Rules, here's the rules of pitching (tongue in cheek and of course).

An obvious one is get the detail right. You'll find typos in here, as usual, as you'll see from the lack of posting, I'm dead busy (pitching!).

1. Don't finish 'the deck' until the latest moment possible. It doesn't matter how long you have to do the pitch, you'll still be fiddling with powerpoint at midnight the night before. There are two possible reasons. The first is the most common, no one really does much of value on a pitch until the moment (a couple of days before mostly) when you realise you've done nothing of value and you're screwed unless you pull a couple of all nighters. The other, extremely devious, is that some bright spark knows that the more time, plus the more people, available for tinkering with a deck, the more it will suffer death of a thousand cuts and end up nothing like it should have..until someone changes it all back at 11.48pm. That's right, you're here at the witching hour because you're totally disorganised, or you are more cunning than a fox and understand the destructive nature of constant meddling.
2. Read the bloody brief. Let's be clear, pitch briefs are not worth the paper they're written on. Usually ten pages long, you'll think the only thing of worth is the box at the end titled 'budget'. Your first instinct will be to ignore the brief, but this is the road to abject failure. Someone has spent hours writing something with some killer information and then tried to be really helpful and giving you acres of more detail - burying the real brief by accident. It's a bit that quote from Sliding Doors,"I'm not going to tell you what I want, but I reserve the right to eviscerate you if don't get it".
3. Planners get the pizza. When the actual work starts, two days prior to the pitch, there will be one individuals who everyone hates the most. Yep, it's the strategist. After two weeks failing to get an internal brief signed off, thanks to 'input' from the usual pitch committee and the fact no one liked the first three drafts, everyone is blaming you for hell they're currently living. What's making it worse is the fact you don't have much to do now. You've interfered in the creative a bit, or really annoyed the TV planners by asking for a groovy spot partnership they really don't want to do. You've even managed to do your strategy charts in 5 slides without a single graph. So now you're twiddling your thumbs, watching everyone work. So get the pizza in, it's the only thing that can save your relationships. Unless you win the pitch that is.
4. Make yourself teflon. You might be 'a team' but when you lose someone will get the blame. Make sure it isn't you. This the only use of senior agency folk. At the right time that is. Show them the strategy as late as possible, leave in a glaring error, let them correct you and think they thought of the whole thing themselves. Show them the deck as late as possible, with another error. Same tactic. The response of the whole team can then be "The CEO signed off on the whole thing". Of course, the CEO will say they took a helicopter view and didn't look at the detail. So you'll need a Plan B. Step forward the internal workshop......
5. Use the internal workshop defensively (time for the dark arts of planning) . This is the planners best chance of avoiding the firing line if things go wrong and being the golden child if you win. We all work in agencies now where planning isn't a job title, we're all planners apparently. So do an internal strategy workshop. Don't bother doing any strategy work first, just go through the brief and some early thoughts. If you do some thinking, everyone will shoot it down, because we're all planners now. So draw out all the bad thinking, write a strategy that's good and make it look like it came from the session...and pick the fall guy who will have 'nailed the big thinking' if you lose the pitch. If you win, take credit for everything. Win, win.
6. Find out how boring you are. The problem with all those internal reviews and rehearsals is that you're preaching to the converted. The kind of people that are happy to listen to someone talking about brand onions v wheels for twenty minutes, the kind who love to chat about the difference between a bottom up plan or top down. This is not your client.  Present to your Mum, wife, partner whatever, or at least someone who isn't involved, see if they get it, how bored they are and how you sound in your head while you're doing it. Trust me, you'll make it shorter and cut out a mountain of rubbish.
7. Everyone does the same stuff. Everyone does store visits, every one does some extra research. Everyone is pretty good at what they do. All the agency decks will be variations on the same theme. How on earth will get their attention and win them over? Start by making it shorter. Don't create the deck that makes you really clever, start with the story that will win hearts and minds.
8. Winning can mean losing. Sometimes you're so desperate to win, you'll promise the earth. sometimes there are clients that get taken in by a glitzy presentation. Just remember, they'll expect you to follow through, and when you let them down, they won't forgive you. There are plenty of agencies who are great at winning pitches but rubbish at keeping clients. Don't be one of them.
9. Bribery always fails in the end. There's always an agency that will undercut the other. Some will even do it for free for a year or something. Imagine the respect people will have for people who value what they do so little they're afraid of charging for it. It's not even worth the brief glow of PR - not when you lose it and it makes a bigger splash then.
10. Ignore every other pitch you've done. Look, it's hard enough managing the conflicting enthusiasms of the pitch team, when folks inevitably start firing presentations from the past that went okay, it really isn't helpful. What worked there will not work here. Different client, different organisation, different team. And, let's face it, it won't have been the 'deck' what won it, it will have been some chemistry between the team and the client and massive piece of luck. One pitch I was part of was successful purely because we picked a fantastic piece of music for the TV.
11. Don't get too full of yourself. That's right, most pitches are a lottery. So don't get all excited when you win and don't throw around your big win on the next pitch, it will count for next to nothing,
12. Leave stuff out. If you want to create a conversation on the day (and you should) leave out the data or the evidence. Just tell them how it is and when they pull you up on it, thank them for asking you and proceed to discuss the facts you have remembered, or noted down. They'll think you know what you're talking about, and won't be numbed by graph after graph. Win, win. 
13. Shut the hell up. You're throwing your best stuff at folks. You want to impress them. You're nervous. So you talk fast, project with confidence and leave no time for people to keep up. Leave space for your big points. Leave space for conversation. Try and create it.
14. Never press for feedback. I lost a pitch because we pressed the kind of organisation for their early thoughts at the end of the meeting. They hadn't any chance to collect their thoughts. Three people were complimentary and gave general pointers about what they liked. Someone else spend 10 minutes going through a ton of small points, stuff he was saying for something to say, he got every else talking, they got more and more negative and you could see them talking themselves out working with us in front of your eyes.
15. Avoid tissue meetings. They're the devil. What fool invented these? Probably someone who hated agencies. You have to turn up with a half baked set of ideas, plans, concepts, strategic directions. You can't go full gas, or you'll have nothing to reveal on the big day. You can't show nothing, or they'll be underwhelmed. Somehow you need to reveal stuff and also keep it back. While giving yourself the chance of getting a bum steer and getting it wrong from a client who will change their mind, even worse, you're making yourself to the work too early, now, not only have you ages for meddling CEO's and the like to change lots of stuff, you've given the client the chance - because loads of tissue sessions don't have the organ grinder, just the monkey. Same with Q&A sessions. If you're not meeting the authority to buy, don't bother.
16. Pick a team that like each other. Hopefully you can put together a group of people that get along . Harder than it sounds in some places I know (and accept no one will like the planner). Clients buy teams, if they get a good vibe,it can outweigh everything else. If you can't get a bunch of people together that don't despise each other, rehearse to death so it looks like they do.
17. Ban the CEO who says 'enjoy it' . As the troops go off into battle, there is always some fool who will say, "Just enjoy it". If you enjoy a pitch presentation, you're either insane or complacent, probably  both. It's stressful, it's pressured, you need to be on top of your game. It is many things, enjoyable is not one of them.
18. Always go to the pub after. It's just what you do. Remember you're short of sleep and knackered, the drink will go to your head. There's nothing worse than winning pitch and then getting fired for telling your bosses what you really think of them because you drank your beer too quick.
19. Observe correct casting. Every pitch needs a pitch leader, someone who can make decisions, a benign dictator - not someone who can only dictate. The people who actually implement stuff - the creative folks, the TV buyer for example, make sure they have to go. These people can be quite glacial, especially when they know the pressure is on you. Tell them they're coming and they'll melt like warm Nutella, and also work that little bit harder. Now isn't the time to be nice thought, if someone can't present, don't let them come.
20. No bullet points. You don't want them to read stuff, you want them to be looking at you and your team. Charts should illustrate what you're saying, not get in the way.
21. Lots of pictures, less words. Pitches are done by committee.You will argue over words, even A WORD. It's harder to dismiss a picture that can carry a few general points.
22. No one cares about the agenda. Don't bother with one.
23. Make sure you can work the laptop. You'd be surprised.

 

The problem with most briefs is they solve brand problems rather than business problems

Let's face it, communications briefs are very brand biased.

I like this questioning I saw:

"The brand will be a very small part of the target customers' lives. What's the rest of it like?"

"Where does the brand fit in? Where could the brand fit in?"

At least it's realistic about the role of brands. But it doesn't really reflect how people buy stuff, or that's what I think.

People still buy products, brands are a much values short-cut to choosing. But people care about them much less than we tend to think.

I'm not going to beat anyone around the head with Byron Sharpe, but let's just dwell on the fact that most buyers couldn't tell you why the brand they buy is different and buy others anyway.

I think the focal point of any brief is knowing how or why people buy the category. What goes through their mind when they're buying it?

For example. if you're selling cars, are you selling sports cars? If so, you need to know how people who are not buyers view the product and brand. A sports car is mostly a badge, you need to know what that badge says to others.

While an MPV buyer is probably looking for a trade off between space and something that doesn't feel like a bus to drive. They'll divide between those who don't give a monkeys what others think and those that don't want to look like they've 'given up' on life beyond parenting.

With sportscars, you'll probably be looking for 'positive wastage' and getting the product in front of folks who won't buy but will judge.

With MPV's you're talking to the practical person a lot more. Maybe.

If you're selling soft drinks, brands are huge of course, but belief in taste, increasingly sugar levels and what it might go with (food for example) matter also. You can have a well loved soft drinks brand with sales falling because folks believe it will make them fat and think the sugar free option tastes rubbish.

So maybe briefs and stuff should be a little less brand obsessed.

"What's the business problem"

"What does that look like from a buyer perspective"

"What can we do to change this"

"When and where is the best for this to happen"

"Why would people care?"

 

 

Incremental gains - real and illusion, they all work

 

I ride my bike a lot. A lot.

Consequently I’ve got quite fast and quite thin - and now tend to spend more than a couple of quid on kit that will make me go faster. Lighter wheels actually make me go quicker, deep rims on said wheels cut through the wind when I go over 20 miles an hour, which is more frequent than a man of my age might expect.

Controversially, as far as my wife is concerned anyway, I also own a couple of ‘aero jerseys’. Skintight tops that don’t flap in the wind and manage air turbulence. I haven’t the foggiest if these actually make go faster, but here’s the thing…because I feel faster, I go faster.

They’ve tested skin-suits on cyclists and found that the ones with bad design, that do naff all to slice through air resistance, make them go faster as they BELIEVE they will.

That’s right, you can con yourself into being better than you are. For a planner and agency folk in general, that’s massive.

Because the other things about all this overpriced cycling gear is incremental gains. Lots of little changes and adjustments can add up to a lot.

Your clothes, dressing like you think a brilliant planner should dress, will probably make that presentation easier to write, or put you on top form for that critical meeting. For some that might mean a corduroy jacket and spectacles. Others, I’m afraid think it means Birkenstocks and Queen T-shirts. But whatever works.

Your environment. I can be very critical of agencies who insist on locating themselves in Shoreditch, Manchester’s Northern Quarter or The Meat Packing District. I believe they need to be closer to where real people live and feed off that. But then again, if you believe you’re in a place full of creative energy, it will drive you forward in a way working in non-descript business park will not. There’s plenty of evidence working in a buzzing city makes you naturally better at creativity and ideas.

Your office. It’s easy to laugh at impossibly well designed, achingly cool offices, but they do help, as long as they’re places you can relax and flourish in, that foster collaboration and allow space to think alone. They don’t have to cost the earth, but they do have to suit you. I guess, whatever you think a brilliant agency looks like, make it look like that and it will actually make you a little more brilliant.

Your work-space and tools. Surround yourself with quality and what you think clever, creative people like and enjoy and it will rub off on you. If you think they drink amazing coffee, make sure you get an aero press. Overpriced fancy notebooks? Do it. Walls you can write on? Feel free.

Real incremental gains. But it’s not just the placebo effect, there lots of little things you can do that actually do work.

1. Choose your colour wisely. A blue room fosters deep thinking, a green room fosters creativity (the light wavelengths work on your brain in different ways). So put some green into your workshop. Put pot plants around the office.
2. Make caffeine widely available, it actually does stimulate brain function.
3. Read lots about everything. Ideas are just new connections between different things, the more you have in your brain, the more likely a new connection will form.
4. Enforce time outs. The subconscious works on problems for you. Which means you need to not think about stuff for a while as it does its work.
5. Talk to lots of people about your project. The mirror neurons fire when you talk to someone else, you see your work from another perspective and enables you to edit and precis a lot quicker. I often find a have a maddening ‘smudge’ of an idea or direction and talking someone else through it usually results in them saying, “So what you mean is…” Most of my propositions where written this way when I was in a creative agency.

Anyway, whatever works for you probably works, no matter what others might think.

How to not be dull

1. What you put is directly related to what you put out. If you're reading the same stuff as everyone else, you'll do the same stuff as everyone else.
2. Cultivate interesting aquaintances. The more you hang out with people who do different stuff to you, the better.  There's nothing more dull than talking about brand models with a bunch of planners. And in general, if you want to be great, be around great people, some of their magic will rub off on you.
3. Avoid routine at all costs. Sorry Big Networks Who Like To Sell a Process and Keep Everything the Same, but if you work in the same way, you'll always do the same work. That goes for your daily routine, do different things in different orders. Sameness breeds sameness.
4. Always operate at the edge of your comfort zone. A really great way of working, or presentation structure or whatever always suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Mix it up, try aspects of the job you're not good at. When I was a swimmer, I would always train with people just a little faster than me, in time I caught up, then it was time to move on.
5. Booze doesn't make you interesting. It can release a few inhibitions, sometimes it can magnify what's inside, but that's it.
6. Great coffee and tea however, work a treat. They increase endurance, sharpen the brain. Don't waste time on the crap stuff though. Filter coffee as a minimum, tea made in a warmed pot (Yorskshire Tea if you can). Surround yourself with quality and it seeps into your work.
7. Be proud of your quirks. Agencies try and iron out the differences between people and get them working the same. This is dumb. Their needs to shared standards, but I'm never going to measured and emotionless, as some planners are, I can't help but be enthusiastic and get excited about things. Some planners are incredibly cheerful and clever. I'm neither, I just manage to say a few things simply. This is not for everyone, certainly not every client, but the ones who like me, tend to like me a lot. An old boss of mine was a force of nature, never suffered fools, bludgeoned some clients through force of personality. Some loved her, some detested her. Some planners naturally distill and less is very much more for them. I tend to stick around people I trust and throw all sorts of stuff around, they tell me the 10% that isn't dumb. You can't pleas everyone, unless you're dull, but you can please a few people a hell of a lot by being yourself and working out how to make that fly.
8. Be good at asking questions. Many planners are shy and fear small talk (I am for sure). Most people like talking about themselves, so get good at asking questions and listening. People will love your company. Be a bit more courageous in meetings and ask the difficult questions, the ones that make people reconsider or re-think. Like, "What is the actual objective?". You'd me amazed how many times I've needed to ask this question.
9. Have a thing. It's dead useful if people remember you for something other than work. Something makes people see you differently. For me it's the obsession with proper tea. For someone else in my office, he's a semi-professional rugby player with a heart condition.
10. Go on a journey. Something that annoys you, something that you really want to sort out, something you've always wanted t happen. Set out to make it a reality, do it with zeal. Enthusiasm and drive are contagious, it will influence the actual job and people will be drawn to your energy. I'm a quest to stamp out crap caffiene in every interaction in my personal and professional life for example. I'm training to do a 70 mile bike race in three and a half hours. It's not much, but it's a daily drive people seem to respond to. A friend of mine is hellbent on building a charity that gives free bikes to kids recovering from cancer.
11. Ignore this list, people who follow guides rather than finding their own way become dull (see point 3!!!)

A simple guide to judging ideas

Of course, really good ideas defy being put in a box - you just know it's good, you then need to figure out why, and how you can make it easy for the client to buy it it (it won't create work for them, it's easy to sell to their bosses because it's based on solving real business problems, it's easy to evaluate).

However, we live in world where too many brands are doing stuff  because they can, rather than they should. They're inventing products and added value services no one wants, making 'content' no one wants to watch and basically doing stuff that is chosen for being cool and innovative, rather than what will transform business success.

This might be useful for the Planning School of the Web stuff by the way...where ideas will need to overcome budget and content and sponsorship mean you need to give more than you take to have a hope of anyone caring!!

Also, with so many stakeholders involved in making things happen these days -  I worked on something recently that involved the creative agency, the digital agency, the media agency, the media owner, the content agency, the PR agency and the sports marketing agency - a creative/content/media/media owner brief or whatever no longer works as a basis to review ideas on the table.

This just might work.......

Does the product or brand actually have a clear part to play in the idea? You see too much stuff these days with a very tenuous link to what the client actually does or sells. People MAY engage with it, but it will do NOTHING for the business unless there is a link between the idea and the client business. And please don't come to me with 'brand awareness', I'm very aware of Donald Trump, but want nothing to do with him

Will it actually create some sort of change in how people think, feel or behave towards the brand or product? Advertising in all it's forms is really about removing reasons not to buy in the short term and delivering a DISTINCTIVE imprint in people's hearts and minds, so the brand comes front on mind in buying situations.

There are only really four macro roles for communication - you're either creating impact with people not interested in the brand or the category, changing what people who have an impression already think or feel (re-positioning), activating brand interest into action, or reinforcing what people think and feel already....and creating a new reference point hopefully (this coffee brand is about being a grown up...but did you know we have a more authentic heritage than you may have thought)

Others would say you should look at the business objective, define what that means in terms of what you need people to do they are not doing now, and then work out the most efficient way of doing that.

Does it get anyone remotely excited? If no one internally, or partner agencies, can be bothered to be excited, or want to make the idea happen, can you expect any real people with proper jobs and a billion things to look at and do on their phones to give a monkeys? Thought not. David Abbot once said, "Tell people about the product in way that cannot be missed". Don't forget the 'cannot be missed' part. A useful guide is if various stakeholders want to start building on it and doing their own little versions.

Does it give a much as it takes (or even more??) I mean does it feel like it's adding to what people really care about? Might people talk about it a bit? Does it feel bigger that the brand or category and add something to real life? Would you share it on Twitter? Brands need to accept no one likes people talking about themselves and we have moved from retailers and brands in positions of power to consumers. Show some respect!

 

 

 

Awards, the truth (or bending of it anyway)

Let’s be clear. Winning awards is nothing to do with telling the truth.
It’s mostly about what you can post rationalise to fit whatever people are looking for.
For IPA Effectiveness Awards for example, judges are looking for econometrics, some sign that above the line advertising still works and something new to tell the industry. The IPA is mostly about making adland look grown up and commercial – and create a bank of data for the IPA DataBank which will always tell you creativity pays back and do TV.
The APG Awards are looking for some sign that ‘planning’ had some influence on the creative work and, again, you have something new to tell the industry. In essence, the APG Awards exist to make planners look like a necessary evil rather than an unnecessary evil. And make planners feel creative.
Media Awards are all about evidence and some sign of innovation. Unlike most ‘creative awards’ where it can just submitting the work with a little background explanation, they’re looking for actual evidence you made a difference to a brand’s fortunes, they hate brand tracking and want actual evidence of sales and behaviour change. But as they don’t want econometrics, you can always find a sales story in the data somewhere. Boiling it down....., because media is boring, the direction of media awards is to try and make media interesting, but more grown up and serious than creative awards.
Creative awards judges are looking for something new and original. Something that hasn’t been done before. They couldn’t care less if it sold anything, or indeed of anyone saw it, as long as it rewrites the creative lexicon. Increasingly, unless you want to enter craft skills sections, this means avoiding actually entering ads and doing lots of social media/events/stunts that four people saw. The essence of creative awards is partly making creatives feel good since 80% of their work is destroyed by suits or planners before it gets to the client, then the rest is mauled by client committees and pre-testing. Leaving 1% of work running close to what was hoped for. The rest of creative awards is down to impressing creative directors at agencies you want to work at.

The essence of all awards is to pretend everything is perfect. Strategy, then creative or buying the plan etc, then production works like clockwork. When of course nothing happens until the day before the presentation and the idea that ran came from a rebrief after the client binned the original work.
The mis-quote the X Files, The Truth is Out There but it’s not in awards papers.

So, here’s a potted guide to winning awards..........

1. 
   If it’s a written paper, write a story. Catastrophise at the beginning, the brand faces a massive challenge, put in some progressive complications (research made us realise we were facing something far worse), throw in a lightning bolt of discovery, base it on a universal truth (we realised this was all about the universal truth that music is form of rebellion to young people) then make sure, when you set out what you actually did, litter with as much gold as you can, focus on what was interesting, rather than what worked…and make the resulting evidence prove it was the interesting stuff that worked. Then write a moral of the story that is something that matches the agenda for the body running the awards…something they would like everybody to do or take on board.
   2. Make sure you build in evaluation into a funky campaign or plan when you are running it….and make sure it measures the cool stuff. I’ve seen some of very best campaign not even get nominated because there was no evidence in the results.
   3. Of course, if you’re entering creative awards, no one cares if it worked, but you need to make sure the best stuff runs. Make friends with the media agency, make sure there is stuff on the plan the client doesn’t care about and doesn’t cost much. And make friends with whoever is doing production. If it ran and it was one off, it still ran and it still counts. Juries are getting wise to this and to be fair, the better awards events have an agenda to celebrate real work, but even then, it’s the little retail press campaign that ran alongside the dull predictable telly that might do well.
   4. Get the client on board if it’s a written case study. Write it early, send it early. They will change it and think you need to reflect what actually happened….leave time for careful negotiation.
   5. You need to get innovation and ace stuff into the sell of the client presentation. The first challenge is getting stuff to happen. So make innovation essential and at the heart of your thinking, not a nice to have.
   6. Writing this stuff is a real pain in the arse, sometimes you are writing papers a year after the stuff ran. So every time you think you have an award winner, write a one pager – catastrophe, insight, what you did, why it worked..and what’s clever bit. It will save you lots of time and heart ache later one.

 

Awards do matter by the way. They are good for morale, clients really like them and brilliant for PR. Seriously, clients tend to select new agencies based on work they’ve seem.

But, like the industry, just don’t make a life or death thing.
It’s only life or death if you get too drunk and the actual do and tell your bosses what you really think of them (trust me).

Side Effects

 

Someone, I forget who, once said everyone is two people.
You have the person inside your head, how you think you are, how you think you come across to others. Exhibit A, the bloke in the media agency pushing mid-40s. He thinks the 36 inch waist squeezed into 32 inch designer jeans, paired with the Hugo Boss blazer comes across as smart casual power dressing. While the 32 inch waist size shows he’s still young and good looking. Exhibit B, the creative director (or Kevin Anderson) rocking the skin-tight black t-shirt to make him look young and edgy.
But then you have the other person, the one everybody else sees. Mr Media Agency, you just look like Jeremy Clarkson. Mr black t-shirt, man boobs were never a good look, not even in the 90’s where your outfit looked okay.
Just as the charismatic, off the cuff presenter (in her head) just goes in too much and looks really unprepared to the poor recipients of her nuggets of gold.
Arguably, there is a third one these days. The one in social media, that is maybe even more divorced from reality, but let’s not go there.
Then there are the planners. Who, on the outside tend to appear super calm, super open and generous all the time. No matter how you feel inside, you are the one who cannot lose your temper, have to earn your place in any meeting, have to look like you know what you are talking about even when you haven’t a clue and, know as much about everything as you can – be a super generalist, make the dullest subject matter seem interesting and, perhaps hardest of all, have to make the few gaps in others drawing breath count, as these are the only seconds you’ll get to say something.
Inside of course, we get just as frustrated, just as angry, just as nervous, suffer just as much anxiety, get just as bored as much as anyone else. This constant disconnect between internal and external dialogue, constant edit, precis and distil and constant hoovering up information, no matter how banal has side effects outside of the job.
In tricky family, or close friend situations, planner folk tend to assume the calm, conciliatory role. When everyone falls out at Christmas over Pictioanary, we tend to be reasonable ones who mediate between parties affronted over the unfairness of letting a seven your old write a word rather than draw, or the cousin who has one too many who offends Auntie Hilda by drawing some genitals.
That said, like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, planners can go the other way. All that calmness at work can mean they have a very short fuse at home and can crack at any second. This is rare, as planners tend to let off the internal pressure cooker with a chosen outlet.
Yep, most planners tend to do something which has nothing to do with planning out of the office. For some, that might be amateur dramatics, for others it might be venting spleen in a blog. Many find an outlet through sport. But rest assured, planners tend to have many outside interests. They may cultivate a persona of ‘being curious’ or ‘making sure they are interesting by being interested’- but mark my words, it’s all to do with making sure they don’t have melt down when someone tells them they’ve missed the breakfast serving by one minute.
All that extra stuff outside the office, couple with the factory visits, the cultural research, having to know what a fifteen year old finds interesting, while understanding what the hell your cloud computing security B2B client actually does, means planners have tons of pointless knowledge. This puts planet sized weight on the shoulders whenever there is a quiz. If there is some sort of agency quiz night, planners will never vote for a department based team structure, the expectation to win is simply too great –especially from the head of planning who will almost certainly lose that calm exterior and go Michael Douglas after endless goading from their other bigwig colleagues. But the mixed teams structure can be a blessing – as planners are never allowed to get their round in, as they need to be present for every question. Of course, it also means they have bladder issues, as they also are not allowed to disappear for a piss.
Dealing with unreasonable people become second nature though. You are so used to killing folks with kindness (Falling Down syndrome aside) planners are good at sneakily getting what they want.
However, this doesn’t go as far as relationships. We’re so used to persuading everyone, rather than just saying it how it is, partners tend to walk all over us. Even worse, we’re so used to not making the decisions, it can be problematic when we are actually given a choice. I’m amazing at making my wife and friends think they’ve chosen the venue for a night out, or what we’re going to watch on telly, but when someone actually says it’s my choice, I melt like warm Nutella.
Consequently, planning types tend to have very strong partners who know their own mind. Good thing too, if two planners got together nothing would ever get done, but at least they would never run out of conversation.
This willingness to be led by others by the way, also means planners should never organise any family outings, stag do’s or mates nights out. Seriously, unless you want to turn to Prague and find your hotel was booked for next month, or be driven into the wrong country (I have done both), don’t ask a planner.
On the other hand, if you’re going to get lost, get lost with a planner. We’re so used to it, we always deal with it pretty well.
Finally, we’re back to where we started, the clothes. Planners needs to look smarter than the creatives, but less smart than the suits. So we’re great at nailing the smart casual thing.
Unless it’s a media planner that is, the jeans, massive brogues, shirt and blazer is highly infectious and penetrates all levels of media.
Working in certain postcodes means some exceptions too. Anyone working around Shoreditch gets really good at spending a month’s salary looking like a tramp.
The general casualness of working attire also means that when you meet friends and family from work, it simply reinforces the impression we don’t have a proper job. When most folks in the pub are sporting a suit, or perhaps the dreaded chinos and suede shoes combo, turning up in £200 jeans and a Cat in the Hat t-shirt reveals you for the middle class dilettante you really are.

The Rules

(this is too long to be spell checked and should be taken with tongue fully in cheek)

 

1. Follow the damned rules

2. Never help others break the rules

3. Help guide those who don't know any better

4. No matter what your excuse is for breaking the rules, it isn't good enough

5. It's all about the work. The only point of any strategic set up (and try showing the creative, the plan, or the content idea etc first and then show how you got there) is to help the client understand why you're recommending what you are recommending. Take the time to write less, they like value being added, you should be giving them insight they haven't considered, or reframing the brief in an inspirational way, but mostly, when they have 20 agencies, research partners and God knows what else, whatever agency you're in, it's more about helping them see the wood for the trees and compressing the hurricane of information they're flailing in, down to one clear task, or three clear principles. No one is sitting there thinking 'I can't wait to see the strategy' they want to see the work/the plan/the content etc. That goes for a strategic presentation too, they don't want chart after chart, they want you to get to a proposition/organising thought/task for communications quickly - that's the 'work' too. It's all about the work. Anyone who says otherwise is either and brandbabbler (as Ad Contrarian would say) or someone who charges a lot for process, rather than ideas and results.

6. Toughen the fuck up.You will sometime have to work late. You will sometimes have to work on a weekend. You will sometimes have to get up early. Your finest work will get rejected. Your finest work will get approved and then killed when budgets get cut. The occasional long hours are the job. The unpredictability and rejection are just business. Your clients answer to a board who don't care about ads and think marketing isn't that difficult. Their business is subject to market fluctuations therefore so are you. A booked media plan will get canned, an ad will get banned unfairly, a client will change their mind. It's called life, no, it's called business.

7. Toughen up even more if you're a planner. 90% of creative's work gets rejected, this makes them slightly sociopathic, if you want crazy great ideas, working with weird folks is one of the things you have to deal with. Creatives deal with rejection all the time. Suits want stuff off their desk and deal with the sharp edge of client business. You always run the risk of being a barrier to the work a creative wants doing, or a suit getting stuff done on time. Few love a planner, the best you can hope for is being tolerated. Get hard.

8. Suits must toughen up even more. See above. No one likes you unless you get them extra budget, defend you from the client, get the travel stuff sorted our or make the tea and coffee. To quote Gordon Gecko, if you want a friend, get a dog.

9. Workshops should never, ever last more than four hours. After that, everyone is silently praying all this will end.

10. Workshops are a waste of time. Trojan horses of mediocrity to quote Adliterate. These are a way for people with bad ideas and little imagination to get really, really smelly ideas into the mix. Only workshop when you have no choice. And if you must have one, employ dirty tricks to get what you need out of it (see Rule 11)

11. Use workshops as major tool for dirty planning. If you have the kind of client, or stakeholder group who never approve anything unless it's their idea, it's time for a workshop. Just make sure you know what the answer is and structure the day and your moderation on helping folks think for themselves.

12. Creatives must reject the brief in all cases, no exceptions. Usually, it's because the brief is crap. Sometimes, it's because it's really great, but no creative will acknowledge this. A creative lives or dies by their ideas, that includes anything sort of strategic. Even if the brief is good, creatives must use the first review to make it look like a good strategy was their idea in the first place.

13. Ignore everything a social strategist says.

14. Media Owners and content partners must ignore the brief at all times. Three rounds of research the client has payed through the nose for, then going back and forth over the comms strategy, the usual tussle between agencies, the three rounds of creative. None of this matters because no one gets content like a media owner, no one else knows how to surprise and delight people like they do. So every presentation needs to have a major piece of work done by a strategist, with a killer insight, such as 'people look up to sports stars' or 'men like driving cars to escape'. Then the brand needs to be reinvented. All this needs to be wrapped up in mediawank language and take forever before you get a re-writing of the creative lexicon with stuff like 'lets go behind the scenes of sports stars training'. Or even better 'tell stories about why men have always loved driving'.

15. Anyone who isn't a media owner should always treat media owners with extreme caution. Never let them present straight to the  client without leaving at least two weeks between you seeing it first and the presentation date.

16. If you work in media agency, take every opportunity to make a creative agency work with a media owner of other content partner. It will complicate everything, but the comedy you will see unfolding totally makes up for it.

17. Ignore everything a brand consultant says. Everything. They get paid to come up with a hallowed document that will change everyone's fortunes, only for you to find it's just a few words in boxes that no one can get any decent work or direction from.

18. If you are short of money, get into brand design. Getting paid thousands to change the pantone reference of the logo, or change one word in a strapline no one cares about is perhaps even easier money than brand consultants.

19. Just call yourself a planner. A strategist, provocateur (really!!!), The Invention team.....it's a stupid title, but let's not look like brand consultants when it comes to branding ourselves.

20. A planning type must put deliberate mistakes in every piece of work. No one likes a smart arse, and by definition, a planner is a smart arse. Also, people are always more likely to like something if they think they helped make it. So put a deliberate mistake in the brief - media/creative/media owner/cross agency whatever and the TV buyer/creative/overpaid 'strategist (hahaha)  at Channel 4 even more overpaid 'strategist at the social agency will happily correct you and think they own the damn thing. Same principle in client presentations.

21. Anyone using the following words in any situation will be henceforth known as a complete dickhead. Ideation. Interface. Visioneering. In fact anyone caught using overlong words will have a drink spilt in their lap. The more complex your language, the more people think you're a complete twonk (and less intelligent).

22. Never ever comment on another agency's work in cross agency meeting. If you are asked, always be positive, or if you are good at damning with faint praise, do so with caution - for example, 'I love the idea of a partnership, it's great when we all have to roll our sleeves up and work with a new partner, that's the thing about really great campaigns, you can't get around having to do more work, but it's well worth it'. Of course, in private, it's tempting to slag them off but clients really can't be arsed dealing with agencies that can't get along, who are always trying to get more work at the expense of someone else. By all means, stab people in the back, but don't let ANYONE know that's what you are doing.

21. Whatever time you want to give the client to approve stuff, double it. That's life.

23. Creatives/media buyers and anyone in production can lose it as often as they like. Planning and account handling folk can never lose their temper and slowly simmer. If you need to vent spleen, take up an active sport, buy a punchbag or, even better, just deal with it. This is just the way it is.

24. Never ever wait until the day before the presentation before you show the stuff to your boss/CEO or whoever. In fact, don't show them it unless you really must. They'll change something just because they can - and since they are now better at bean counting, dealing with politics and cooking the books, they won't be any good at actual advertising any more. Just use them to charm the client now and again and make sure they don't say anything daft.

25. Be nice to the head of client services. They have been put there to keep them quiet and pacify them for the fact they'll never make CEO or MD. In fact, the only reason they are still here is because their one skill is making clients like them.

26. Give up the suits. Of course, creatives should never wear suits, but strategy types shouldn't either - just never look as casual as creatives. Suits should consider giving up the suits too, clients really don't care that much. Of course, one or two do, but with these exceptions to the general rule, only the suits should worry about wearing suits. It's just the way it is.

27. Never ever cut corners with coffee or tea. Obviously, this goes for client meetings. Tea made in the pot, coffee in a cafetierre is a minimum, but respect each other too and make the effort to do it right. No fucking instant coffee, no substandard tea bags. Never pour any tea or coffee unless it's brewed for at least three minutes. If you want weak tea or coffee, just get some hot water, as weak tea or coffee are just water pretending to be something else. Warm the milk if you're making coffee, never warm the milk if it's tea.

28. Surround yourself with quality. This relates to the quality of the hot drinks, but also your sound system, your books and so on. Quality stuff will rub off on you.

29. Get out of the bloody bubble. Marketing folk are not normal. It's not normal to want to make transient stuff that makes people want to buy stuff they don't need. But the folks we're trying to persuade to buy stuff they don't need, they require us to understand them. So get the fuck out of your office, out of SOHO, Brooklyn, Madison Avenue, The Northern Quarter or whatever cool postcode you're in and go be with real people. As a minimum, once a month: Go to a popular shopping mall and a supermarket. Consume some popular media you think is beneath you. Go to where your target customer is and try and talk to some of them.

30. Do not believe any research that was done anywhere but where people are buying or using what you are selling. People lie, they lie to themselves. The only useful research is done in real time, in the jungle rather than the zoo.

31. Get better at traditional research than researchers. Know thine enemy.

32. Make friends with traffic if you're in a creative agency. Make friends with all the PA's. They know everything that is happening. Everything.

33. Don't count the powerpoint slides. Sometimes 100 slides is okay, sometimes 5 is perfect. It depends on your pace,style and what you need to deliver. Rehearse and time the presentation, rather than count slides.

34. Never get so pissed on a works do you can't remember what you have said. Trust me on this.

35. If you must have to drink with the client, stay at least two drinks behind. Never go home before them, unless you're a lightweight. Better to be thought of as no fun than try and sleep with them, tell them how much you hate your spouse, or call them a c***t.

36. Edit everything you do three times. It will be too long and not watertight first time. It will be better next time around. Only at the third round will it be acceptable. It's just the way it is.

37. It never gets easier, you just have more to deal with. The more important you get, the more shit you have to deal with. If you're a junior, an account director should make it look easy because they need to instill confidence in you and their clients. They will be crying inside close to a deadline as much as you, they just get better at dealing with it...and deal with more.

38. If you're under 30 stop moaning about how much money you are not making. No one makes much until they reach 30, and even then, they won't be paid as much as a lawyer or banker. If you want to make serious money, start and agency and plan to sell it (and you're soul).

39. The size of an agency is inversely proportioned the quality of its I.T. That's just how things are.

40. Look at your job very hard every two years. if you're bored, if you're stagnating, or if you are underpaid, consider looking elsewhere. Never move for the money alone, I know too many people who left a great job to become highly paid malcontents in places that weren't right. If you're bored or stagnating, see if there is something you can do about it, if not, jump....your bosses will probably be wondering why you are still here anyway.

41. Respect the past. It wasn't much better, but most of what you think is the latest thing has been done before and better.

42. Ignore awards papers. In awards land, everything works, the process is simple, there is always a catastrophe and a flash of insight that came from nowhere. Awards papers never reflect what really happened, not even the original strategy. IPA papers are just the ones where the client would pay for econometrics. Creative awards are designed to impress creative directors, not real people. So when you get a case study that says the strategic leap was imagining the brand was a woman, rather than a man, you know what to do don't you?

43. Don't become mired in the past. Culture changes, markets change, the trick is to move with the times and keep what was great about the past. Every great brand (agency brands too) tends to fail when they stop moving forward, or forget what made them great in the first place. Yes, that is a contradiction, deal with it.

44. It isn't death of TV.

45. It's not the age of whatever you think it is.

46. If an agency with a reputation for being ruthless, formulaic or really dull wants to hire you, if that kind of think suits you, fine. If not, run for your life, they will never, ever change.

47. If client wants you to shake thinks up and challenge them with more original thinking, and they have a past of being hard to work with, dull or formulaic, unless there is a new CEO or CMO, run for your life if it's a pitch. They will never ever change. If it's an existing client, make sure you have a formulaic plan B, that's what they'll buy in the end.

48. If you work in a media agency you need to be able to drink. This is just the way it is.

49. if you work in a social media agency, you need to be able to sell snake oil.

50. if you work in a creative agency, you need to be OK with drinking yourself to sleep occasionally.

51. Everyone who doesn't work in marketing thinks they can do your job. That's just the way it is.

52. All deadlines, no matter how long you have, shall be ignored up until the day before when everyone shall spring into action and do two weeks work in two days.

53. The senior person buys lunch. Always.

54. Never, ever, sleep with a client. It always ends in tears. Trust me on this.

55. Work is to be measured by quality, not quantity. That goes for how long your hours are, the length of any document, the number of slides or any work you are doing.

56. The purpose of pitching is to win. It's not a time to tell the client their brief is wrong, or stick to your guns on challenging work. You don't know them yet. Read the brief, follow the brief, give them what they will want to buy. It won't be what eventually gets bought or booked anyway.

57. Marketing Books should be read with caution. Marketing books are usually written by people wanting to sell their services and based on bad evidence, or evidence that supports an argument that sells books rather than client products and services. Always have your own point of view and read stuff about what your clients are selling. That should always include the annual report.

58. Follow the money. Get to know the clients finance officer, they know more about what the business thinks it needs. And find out who really makes the decisions, in one case for me, it was the CEO's son. Once you know who it is and what they like, shape your sell to this person. The greatest work you ever did was probably something that never got bought.

59. A great idea is a great idea. Legend has it, the Cadbury Gorilla was in a creative's draw for years, waiting to be post rationalised for the right brief. Always keep great ideas on file, you never know.

60. Post rationalisation isn't a crime (as Russell Davies would say) it's a valid way to get great ideas made. Never sell great ideas if they are not right for the brief, but if it's great and it's right, no one cares if the strategy came before or after apart from the strategist.

61. Process is a smokescreen. Any kind of agency flails around, drinks lots of caffeine, panics and eventually something good emerges and it gets developed just in time. A process is to to give clients the illusion of professionalism, it never works like that in real life.

62. The only way to get a good idea is to work hard. Flashes of inspiration are rare, great work usually comes from getting a bad idea quickly, and then working out what is wrong with it.

63. Never kill an idea by speaking before thinking about it. Our industry is supposed to be about originality, and our first reaction to new stuff is fear and rejection. You're first response will be wrong, live with it for awhile - and shut the fuck up.

64. Never encourage anyone to kill your ideas before they have chance to think. You present something, you're desperate for approval like a little puppy , bouncing up and down, desperate for appreciation. But if you ask someone what they think, before they have had chance, they'll say something they don't mean, and to keep face, will stand by it through thick or thin. Well done, you've just killed your own work.

65. Have the courage to change your mind. We're all wrong sometimes. It's not weak to admit you're wrong, but agencies can be very macho and all about winning the argument. Don't win arguments, win pitches, do great work, go home.

66. Have the courage to stand your ground. Sometimes you know you are right. Just know when you want to pick your battles. A client I trust once told me what they want is to be listened to, to have their feedback taken on board, but also for agencies to have the courage to say what they think and recommend what is right, but be aware the decision is the clients at the end of the day.

67. The start time of a day is fluid, just as the end is. That's just the way it is.

68. No one cares about the 'brief' as much as it's author. The creative director cares a bit, because it's make them feel like they still matter when they insist on changing a word in the proposition. The client likes to sign off the brief sometimes to make them feel creative. The planning director likes to sign off the brief because they can change another word and claim the thinking if it becomes next year's award winner. Creatives like arguing over the brief because it's fun toying with you before they ignore it completely. The TV buyer likes you doing a brief because they can refuse to work until they've got said brief,  and recover from the heavy night out with Channel 4 (which is why the brief will get ignored if they can't put Channel 4 on the plan). The suits like a brief because they like the illusion of holding creatives/media buyers/media owners to account. Of course, everyone ignores the brief and does what the hell they like. Which is why you should write one brief for the briefing and another after the first review, based on the work people like. No one will notice, they hardly read the brief anyway.

69. Have fun for Christ sake. You're not in an agency for a quiet life. You're not in it to be super rich. You're there because this is what suits your talents and, more importantly, you like being around interesting people. If you're not having fun, the hard work will get too hard. If there is no banter or good conversation, what the hell are you in an agency for?

70. Develop a thick skin. Agencies get through the day with a very sharp humour and wind each other up mercilessly. It's just the way it is.

71. if you work in a media agency, you'll find everyone swears more than they should. Get used to it.

72. Be nice to everyone. It's too hard for politics as it is, but more importantly, the industry is too small and an enemy will probably end up as your boss or your client.

73. Lighten the fuck up. We are not doctors, none of this really matters.

74. Forget the babble. Reach as much of the market as you can, as often as you can, say something about what you do or sell in a way that cannot be missed, try and get talked about, continually remove reasons not to buy.

75. You are there to sell things. You are not there to build brand meaning or change culture, these things MAY be a means to sell things sometimes. If you want to make people laugh, be a comedy writer. If you want to do culturally significant stuff, work for HBO. You do need an appreciation of what makes people laugh, what moves people, what they like, what they hate. But all this is in service of making people want to buy things......which tends to be as simple as being the one they've heard of that sort of feels right. And no one cares about the brand positioning apart from brand babblers.

76. Celebrate the introverts. The people who rise to the top in fast paced, sink or swim agency life, tend to be the charismatic people who are super confident and own the room. We support their decisions because we want to believe them. But while there is merit in acting quickly and then refining as you go along, their is little room for the quietly spoken, the ones who don't win by speaking first or being the loudest, the ones who think a little more, question things and don't naturally think they are right. Let everyone speak and bloody listen to them. The job is more complex than ever, don't fall in love with your first idea, listen to everyone, the more eyes you have on a project, the better it will be...as long as their is a benign dictator overlooking everything.

77. All agencies will try and fight over the core comms planning. That's the way it is......and can be healthy if everyone listens to each other.

78. Creative agencies can't do media. They just can't. If you want to do media, start a media department.

79. Media agencies can't do creative...but think they can.

80. Digital agencies will never be unbiased, only let them do digital.

81. Media owners can't do ads, yet. They think they can, but do not them do comms strategy or creative strategy.......just brief them right based on a good idea.

82. The term 'native' shall henceforth be banned..........it's a bloody advertorial.

83. Obey the rules

How to train junior planners

OK, so after the 'how not to train junior planners' here's some thoughts on how to go about it.

Although, I guess much of it has been covered by pointers in the last post.

Still, worth a positive outlook and some general pointers.

 

Much of it is based on some simple principles:

First, great planners are interested in much more than planning or advertising or even brands.We're interrupting what people care about, or these days, finding a way to be part of it, so the more we care about THAT the better.

Second, no two planners are the same, nor should they be.

Third, happy people produce better results and stay far longer.

Fourth, planners without evidence based work are just suits with more opinions.

Fifth, creative planners are losing their role as 'lead planner' with many clients.

Finally, it's hard enough being a senior planner type when you have to earn your right in the room, for a junior, it's Everest.

 

1. Great Planners are interested in much more than planning

This means you need to give them both the space and the encouragement. Agencies can work long hours, but when you are a junior, it's easy to think you need to stay late every single night, or get in at the crack of dawn. Some places make it known that this is encouraged, but all you get are tired and stupid people who are nowhere near their best.

What is worse, if they spend all their waking hours talking about advertising, they'll only plan for 'advertising' rather than planning for making real people care. Rather than pulling stimulus from the world at large and being able to inspire the team around what really interests people, to make advertising register, they'll just start doing 'advertising'.

Even more dire, they'll start thinking it's a desk job and not go out and meet the people they're supposed to making strategy for - real human beings. As has been said a billion times, research is a waste of time unless you observe people in their real environment. If you want to understand a species, go to the jungle. not the zoo.

So apart from sending folks out of the agency and protecting them from a 'presenteeism' environment, here are two stimulating things you can do:

First, give every junior planner (in fact every planner) a 100 day task every single year, where they have to go and find out something new and interesting about an important target audience for your clients. To focus the minds, they have to present to a senior team and even the client if you have that relationship. The evidence can only be what you have discovered from 'non-advertising' tools, no TGI, no WARC, no NVision. And they need to have some video of actually talking to people.

Second, get an 'interesting fund' set up, where everyone in your department gets £200 to invest in learning something new and interesting, or enriching a private passion. It could be learning to play the guitar, doing a video production course. They just have to write why they are choosing what they are choosing -  and share what they're learned and what it's taught then about the job at the end of the year. 

2. No two planners are the same.

In the previous post, we discussed the wrongness of the one size fits all planning approach. The problem with a proprietary process is that it makes you approach every brief the same way, and usually come out with the same solution. It's why every campaign out of Chiat Day looks like an Apple campaign and always has a manifesto in it somewhere. Just as doing the same workshop over and over again yields the same kind of idea.

Boundaries and guidelines are good. Fixed rules are not.

But it's much more than that. There are core planning skills of course, but even these are debatable. This is a good starting point.

Nowadays, the skills of a planner are too broad to be contained in one human being. Generally, you need to know how most stuff works and be able to knit it together into something more cohesive, but 'most stuff' is getting a very large requirement. Getting to grips with data, the rapidly changing media environment, digital and social media, the need for content as much as ads.

You need a team that's good at different stuff and can do things different ways.

Someone ace at data, I mean the really hard stuff, not just TGI.

Someone who lives and breathes digital (but get's it's place, double so for social media).

A good comms planner is a must these days.

But then someone who has the rare instinct for retail too. If you think retail is easy, try writing a brief that stimulates people into the saying the word 'sale' a different way, or someone who can handle a sales force.

You might need someone who get's healthcare, B2B, maybe someone who get's international brand planning.

In short, you need to recruit for filling gaps, not for carbon copies.

Especially folks who are good at what you are not.

They need to be assigned accounts that suits their skills and interests - and some that do not.

So they get to do what they're good at, plus enrich their knowledge and skills base. Give them enough space to learn from mistakes and issues, with enough support and 'open door' sensibilities so they feel they can come for help (and not be made to feel stupid).

As mentioned before, making them do secondments in other departments really works here.

All of the above kind of goes towards happy people staying longer and producing results by the way, which was point 3.

 4. Planners without evidence or just suits with more opinions.

There's a vogue for 'ideas' rather than insight. I don't mean some sort huge revelation, which are hard to come by, but evidence based thinking that unlocks other people's skills.

My view on this stuff is that our task is to get to a really great task, a jumping off point for everyone based on: brand/product/market/customer/audience/media/shopping or customer journey/culture. Our task is to knit these sources of input into once clear task for communications that everyone can get behind. If you miss one of these, you haven't done your job, and if any of it doesn't have some evidence, you haven't done your job.

The core observation might have some sort of focus or emphasis.

For example, this was all based on a shopper insight that women bought lots of shower gel for men:

 

This campaign was based on a cultural insight that the Scots are very optimistic supporters who deal with defeat and victory really well, supported by all sorts videos from sporting events and street interviews..

 

With a special bookend after the games, based on the pyschology insight that we remember the end of things best, and stories of how movie companies film and research the ending scenes to death.

 

Anyway. For junior planners, I think we need to get back to training them to be very good researchers. Planners used to be focus group moderators who then turned the findings into usable hooks for strategy and creative work.

We rarely have budget to moderate groups for development (and I can safely say most of us know it's a waste of time) but now we have all that data freely available from the internet, trends stuff coming our of our ears, all sorts of market data, Mintel reports and, if you are lucky enough, TGI and Touchpoints. A really great planners will look at all that stuff and connect it in a way someone else won't.

Or they'll just go out an meet their audience and talk to them enough to understand the business issue in the context of real life...which is always the real competition for the brand. Just get some proof video, quotes and try and quantify it in some way.

I think our job is to teach junior people these skills (and some bloody senior people) and as a leader of a department, hold everyone to account .

And train your team to connect things. There are not really new ideas, just new re-combinations of old ones. I think that means teaching them to mind-map, teaching the unfashionable are of distillation and....

Make sure you have some sort of scrapbook initiative. Some of that is taken care by the 100 day projects and interesting funds from above, but it's worth having a scrapbook initiative. A vault of interesting stuff for everyone to draw on. I suggest a team TUMBLR, perhaps with a different editor every month. But the trick is to get the team to all contribute - as long as your hiring people with different skills and interests (you should be).

For me,  all of the above will really help that 'lead planner' issue. It's fair game for any agency now and I feel that the planner that:

Has the most interesting things to say, the one people want in the room, will be that planner by default.

That doesn't mean they talk the most - in fact, they should be taught to keep their mouths shut, listen to everyone else and speak last (see IRN BRU thankyou ad insight).

They should be taught to plan for meetings, to have something evidence based to say that will make everyone think, create a discussion point and shed light on the agenda .

Like Gordon Gecko says here:

 

They should be taught to always know more about client business, target customer and relevant culture than any other supplier and, in the case of customer and culture, anyone in the client business.

These are more important than 'ideas'.

Catalyst.

Simplifier.

Provocateur.

And, dare I say, the person that brings real life, the lives of real customers and culture into the room.

Which brings me to a final point.

The more complex your language, the more people think you are an idiot. The best planners speak human. The task of a leader is not tie their team up in knots with needless jargon and buzz words.

It is to set an example by speaking plainly and bollocking anyone in your team if they don't do the same.

Hope this helps.

(very busy, this will be riddled with dreadful typos, sorry, no time to check overly!!)

 

 

 

 

How not to train junior planners

I got an intriguing email from someone recently asking if I knew of any posts from myself, or other planner types, about training junior planners.

I have to admit I did not.

Which, after thinking about it for a bit, was a little shocking.

There has never been more competition, between the various agencies that make up 'adland',to hire and keep talent than there is now.

This industry just isn't as attractive next to other career paths as maybe is once was. It's much less cool, pays less relatively, has less career stability and works long hours.

So, despite the prolific chatter all over the interwebs on 21st Century Branding, the Death of TV, the death of ad agencies, it's a real shame there isn't decent content on the hiring and development of great talent.

It's a focal point on much wider, real issues around the hours we ask people to do, how we charge for our ideas as opposed to our time and the general rule that if you want people to do well, stay and give you their best, you have to treat them properly and balance their quality of life and career path with the very real need to make money.

I replied with a few pointers, but I thought I might do a bit more here.

I'll start today with the easier one, what not to do. This is of course based on personal experience as someone who was a junior once, but also observations gleaned from the experience of others.

So, how not to train junior planners (and to some applies to junior folks in agencies per se):

1. Don't try and make them have YOUR idea.

The problem with many planning directors is that they are great at thinking and having ideas, but rubbish at bringing it out of others. This can be seen in the way they interact with other departments, they are the ones who stick to their strategy or proposition and don't like it being changed- as opposed to the ones who are great at generating and spotting great ideas from others ( have to admit I'm the latter, mostly because I don't have many good ideas and it's easier to get others to do it for you!!).

So it follows that when they let juniors have a go at a project, they won't be able to see the merits of the solution the junior comes back with, because they will already have something in mind themselves, so they'll belittle the poor bugger about what might be wrong with their thinking and evidence, rather than looking at what's good and what can be developed.

Even if it's bollocks, you need to find a way to praise their effort, show them why it's wrong and empower them to find another solution - rather than call them stupid and say, 'what you should have done it this'. There is no ONE solution, just like with economists who cannot agree on anything, there is more than one approach. Listen, help, encourage and guide. So...............

2. Don't expect them to work at the velocity as you.

So what follows should be simple, allow for the fact they'll be a little slower than you at stuff and when you work on a project together, you need to make time to talk them through things, explain things a little more and stuff.

I learned the hard way that there is no point telling my kids 20 seconds before we're leaving the house that it's time to go, then getting grumpy when take an age to find their shoes, pick a toy to take or go to the toilet, their agenda is not mine. It's like that working with juniors - you're dead busy, you could do it twice as quick, but if you don't make time to help people learn, they'll never get better and be stuck thinking nothing they do is good enough.

3. But don't be a light touch.

Once, planners were allowed to be late for things, to get lost on the way to meetings and generally be a little air headed.

No one has the time and patience for this any more. Because as they progress, they'll have to deal with more of a blur between 'suit' and 'planner' and do more things that people in real jobs have to think about.

Only let them get away with  being late, lost or forgetful once. That goes for rigour too. There's a trend for planners to have 'ideas' these days rather than evidence based strategy based on proper examination of the information at hand.

It is critical to have evidence based thinking, otherwise you are just someone with opinions, even more these days with Lord knows how many people thinking they can own the strategy: the creative agency, digital, media, media owners, brand consultant and whoever else are all trying to own the lead strategy and even lead creative.

The only defense for a good working planning team and its agency is to be able to back up their ideas better than anyone else, and be able to de-stabilise first page, slap dash stuff from other folks. I'm not saying every idea should be backed up with a flash of amazing consumer insight (but I weep at the trendies who seem to think this doesn't matter anymore) but there is so much to be gained from looking at TGI harder, reading the clients' annual reports, or just bloody going out and talking to people who work for your client or real people on the street.

This goes for you too by the way, it's easy to fall into the 'because I say it is' camp when you get senior, because you can force your thinking through, which will come unstuck eventually, getting your team to back up their thinking encourages you to do the same.

4. Don't moan about the good old days.

This might manifest itself as 'the good old days when I used to work 16 hour days as a junior and spend 5 years not being allowed to go to a client meeting'- in order to rinse your people for every drop of energy they have.

Those days are, if not gone, they are fast going and there is no point burning your people out, and getting them to change to another career because they've had enough. Likewise, the good old days when you could charge a fortune, you made loads of TV ads, clients took more risks, bought more better work etc.

No one needs to hear they joined the industry too late, you're just encouraging them to do something else. And it really wasn't that much better was it? Rather, help them embrace the limitless possibility of mixed up media - and the fact that few are able simplify and make it something clients can embrace gladly.

They know more about digital than you do, they're on Snapchat and you are not (I hope) - embrace the future with them and stop boring them with a past that wasn't as rosy as you now like to believe these days.

5. Don't try and create cardboard cut-outs of yourself.

You will be really great, really experience dand able to apply it to all sorts of varies briefs and projects. You will have learned to overcome weaknesses and build on natural strengths.

But your are a one off, the product of a mixture of genes and experiences. Your are a one-off - and so are the people who work for you. They will have different in-built strengths and weaknesses, so making them work in only one way -  be that developing workshops, the times of day they best work, getting respect from other departments, the style they write briefs in, how they apply research, how they present - in other words, your way, is doomed to fail.

Figure out what, in your own arsenal are universals anyone should know and practice (always sit in the middle of the table to get gravitas in a meeting, don't get excited about a high index on TGI until you look at the actual percentage of the audience, speak last in any review of any kind of work if you can) and then what should be a library of approaches for your team to try and see what works and what doesn't.

That also goes for presentation decks. They are the background and 'props' for the speaker, no more no less. Insist on any agency template if you like, but apart from that, it depends on how someone presents - naturally 'tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you've told them' 'find a theme' are universals.

But applying some storytelling structure etc, how that works depends on the person.

Just as some planning folks don't sweat a proposition (thoughtleader or core thought) in a brief or client strategy presentation, and work on a really juicy task, or even a transformational insight instead (but every brief or deck should have one focal jumping point, everything else builds up to or from this point, but then again that might be how I work!!!).

6. Don't be a parrot for the proprietary process.

Look, every agency in various disciplines sort of works the same. They flounder around for a bit, they get worried about the deadline, something comes up and then they work like mad to be ready for the deadline.

They hide this from clients as sell a process that gives the comfort of making things look professional and predictable (and procurement loves to buy a process). This benign conspiracy sort of works, as long as you remember it's a conspiracy and the process is really a load of bollocks.

So forcing your people to follow a process just doesn't work, especially as, as mentioned before, they need to find the best way to work efficiently in their own way. Make everyone work the same and you get the same stuff. Just as every brief isn't about 'disrupting the market or zigging where others zag'.

At the basics of communications strategy, there is only really 'impacting with the audience' 'activating people to do stuff' 'reinforcing how they feel, or what they know, about something, or 'Augmenting' - changing how they feel or what they know. But that's four, not one and it changes depending on the brief.

Your team need the freedom to explore these four ways, then understand how their thinking can be made to fit the 'planning model' or how the client thinks communications works - freedom, guidance. Not suffocation and constriction.

7. Don't over-protect them

I learned when I was a competitive swimmer that no amount of training can prepare you for real racing. The pressure, the way your body copes with adrenalin, how you respond when the pain kicks in and only willpower can help you carry for the final metres. You can only get better at racing by racing.

It's the same with client meetings, dealing with grumpy creatives, scary TV buyers, doing presentations or even the moment when the pitch team has a melt-down when they can't seem to crack the brief.

Gradual exposure, starting as soon as possible is the only way to get good at this stuff. The first cut is the deepest, but until you are able to get used to things, learn from mistakes and get used to the realities and pressures of the real job, you are not really doing the job.

Great thinking and insight is only 20% of it. Being able to persuade others of your thinking, internally and externally, empowering others, thinking on your feet and, critically, being able to deliver solid work time after time, being a safe pair or hands rather than a 'either brilliant of dire' planners are where the job is really done.

So honesty about where ideas come from, the fact they do not appear mostly as if by magic, they emerge and are developed by lots of reading, hard work, edit, precis and distillation and, also, having the dignity and generosity to include as many people as you can in the strategy, as they might strike lucky instead of you, which also means having the courage to admit when someone has some better thoughts and when you are totally wrong.

But also knowing when to be firm, when to let people down gently, to prove them wrong but leave them smiling, to be able to stand your ground without being obstinate.

In other words, always being the bigger person,

 

Big Data v Wisdom

"Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted"

Einstein

A lot has been promised by Big Data. Mega things. Most of it seems like over excited over claim, but probably, sooner or later, it might deliver.

There are examples today of how it can be good. The US House of Cards reboot is thanks to the number of people liking Kevin Spacey content also liking political drama.

But  Big Data is also responsible for online retailers stalking me with re-targeted ads of things I have already bought. It's meant that when I buy stuff for my wife and kids, I can't move for ads selling me more of the same.

When any idiot human could intuit that I really don't want an avalanche of offers for women'srunning gear, Zara shoes or Star Wars Lego (okay, I'll give you Star Wars Lego).

Of course there is a great example of a US supermarket that got publicly roasted by a father, furious that his teenage daughter had been sent stuff for maternity, only for the father to apologise when he found she actually WAS pregnant and was too scared to tell him.

it can right, yet horribly wrong.

On the subject of supermarkets, big data has been around for a while, Tesco is the pioneer with its Clubcard, the value of knowing intimate shopping habits was priceless for them.

But Tesco in the last few years, if you excuse the expression, is fucked. It forget to look at what customers were really bothered about, what they cared about. In post recession UK, shoppers want a lot more simplicity, less hassle and it's uncool to waste things. The avalanche of short term offers, multi-buys and the like turned shoppers off looking for a trusted price, looking for great quality in less stuff, rather than pointless choice and fleeting discounts.

All the while, we started shopping for little and often. Many started looking for intimacy and the feeling of real care and attention, in some things anyway. While in others, they just wanted simple no-frills functionality. You could say that Tesco, with all its data, got squeezed between people wanting more stuff from a good butcher AND the simplicity of a discount grocer like Aldi.

Yet you can't move in marketing circles, and business in general, for data scientists. Like the web developers before them, or the social media gurus of today- and the brand consultants that still manage to sell snow to eskimos, these folks are the latest thing.

But let's not be too harsh. The central premise of data is still sound. It makes sellers wiser when selling to potential buyers and, when done right, adds value to buyers buy not wasting their time with things they have no interest in.

Now I know the arguments from Byron Sharpe about light buyers and targeting the whole market. Even today, ignore the arguments that mass broadcast media doesn't work, even with young folks. It does if it is done well.

But big organisations are still very dumb when it comes to their customers. They are numbers, not names. Perversely, the web has created the death of the human and the personal.

There is lots of talk of 'personalisation' but that is not the same as intimacy.

Old fashioned shopkeepers, who are now in vogue to some degree, were the pioneers of big data. They remembered what their customers liked, they recognised them when they came in. The fishmonger in Leeds market always kept mackeral aside for my Grandmother on a Thursday morning. Today, my local butcher knows when I walk in the door that I buy a mountain of his thick sausages and gets them out without asking. He knows a BBQ in summer and talks to me about new marinade ideas and stuff I haven't tried.

Some of this emotional intimacy can be delivered by the power of great brand building. Nike feels different to Adidas, it just does.That's why I sometimes don't believe the data about people not being able to say why a brand is different, it's like trying to do a questionnaire about why you love your children, it's a smudgy feeling that you can't always express.You remember how the brand feels when you're in buying mode, yes it comes to mind, but so does the emotional resonance.

But we can do better than that. Brands should be able to understand its customers better. Much of the personal, CIM marketing is a waste of time of course, working with heavy buyers who would buy anyway, but data should help us work out ripples of behaviour on a much larger scale.

A sports brand should know that loads of it's football buyers also love not just comedy, but what kind of comedy, what comedians. They could then set up a multi-platform football comedy show where their favoured comedians banter around footie.

An FMCG salad dressing company should know that people who like the brand but don't buy often also love a grilled chicken and do recipe campaigns with their favourite celebrities for using the dressing with chicken too.

Because ads in Facebook trying to sell me slippers are really not good enough.

But data is only a tool. I cannot replace imagination, emotional intelligence and intuition. It cannot produce the consistent ideas that recombine old ones.

It would tell Steve Jobs not to launch the Iphone.

It would tell Henry Ford people preferred horse.

Put another way, numbers can help us make sense of the world but, today at least, they cannot replace wisdom.

Why Lego tells us that innovation is more perspiration than inspiration

Where I work was responsible for this..

 

It's actually a simple idea.

Not so simple to pull off.

It took lots and lots of hard work.

That's the truth about innovation, new ideas or general stuff that isn't the usual or expected.

Having ideas isn't easy of course, but it isn't the toughest bit.

The toughest bit is getting them to ever see the light of day.

New ideas tend to look like hard work.

To account handling types who have to get the stuff made, and persuade the client.

To clients who have to sell in plans and stuff to commercially focused people who don't like surprises.

Clients for whom advertising and stuff is about 10% of their entire job.

Clients who want their lives simplified and who live in quarters of years.

So how do you get stuff like the Lego ad break made?

Make it something the client HAS to buy.

Don't make innovation and great work a nice to have.

Make it central to the strategy.

Clients and especially their finance directors don't want nice to haves.

They want stuff that will transform their business.

If you're a planner, this is down to you.

You.

Make it easy to sell into the wider business.

Make it something anyone can explain in 30 seconds.

Because that's what your client will have to do.

Then make it seem easy to actually get off the ground.

Don't make it look like extra work.

If they want it enough, they'll put a bit more effort.

A bit.

The trick of the Lego thing was that the team did the work with ITV and the other brands.

They worked their arses off.

They never expected anything done for them.

They did the work.

They took responsibility.

And then they made sure they could prove the effect.

By building evaluation into the sell.

Not just soft media figures.

You know, views, shares and the like.

Exit interviews in cinemas, to help link those that claimed to see the break and those that paid to see the film.

They wrote an IPA paper on it even.

That's the thing about innovation.

It's actually really boring.

Because it's a slog.

It's not for the glory seekers or 'ideas people'.

It's for the workers.

The folks that won't give up.

Just like any account that people think they would like to work on is usually incredibly hard.

Every time I've worked on something others might call 'sexy' it''s always been hard work.

Because good clients demand the best.

They expect to buy stuff that's not just great, it's commercially watertight.

And they're busy and expect you to do the work.

It's the crap clients that hard work.

Not least because they don't buy innovation.

But then again, they tend not to buy innovation because they haven't persuaded why they should bother.

In other words, creativity and innovation isn't about flashes of innovation and glory.

It's about the long slow grind.

Against the tide

"When the opinions of the masses of merely average men are everywhere become the dominant power, the counterpoint and corrective to that tendency would be the more and more pronounced individuality of those who stand on the higher eminences of thought"

John Stuart Mill

In other words, if you want to do the kind of work you always talk about wanting to do, you need to work twice as hard as everyone, and not be afraid of being different.

Now go into any agency department look at what they all wear, not the unspoken uniforms and ask yourself, are their any individual here? Is this really a hub of new thinking?

 

The Account Planning School of the Web Results are in

The results to Rob's tremendous assignment are here, do have a look, it's ace and people have worked really hard.

A weekend with clients and some, now legendary, pink footwear

A useful way of looking a your relationship with clients is asking yourself, "Would they want to spend two hours on a train with you".

As a client once said to me. "You can have the best planning, the best creative and the best pricing, but you won't get anywhere if we don't like you".

So I was pleased to be invited to spend a whole weekend with some of them, riding 150 miles.

You know you must be doing something right when they're happy for you to see them in lycra.

Not to mention share a jacuzzi in the hotel after day one.

That said, they were a little incredulous at the pink overshoes.

To quote the commercial director, "What the fuck are they".

There was the cafe stops.

The ice cream stops.

The amazing landscape in the Scottish borders.

The sea on the run up to Edinburgh.

What wonderful people.

Two ads in a matter of seconds

If you're buying outdoor in general, it's one message and that's it.

You have a few seconds, no more.

If folks take out one message and know who it's from, you've done your job.

With 'Street Talk' stuff like phone box's you have less. These are mainly for getting for people on foot in their day to day.

The ad I saw (below) really doesn't do that. Intentionally or not, it's three messages.

"Always fresh and tasty"

"Prepared in shop everyday"

And then a promotion to activate in that order.

The first has no place on street talk really, especially if they're trying to activate footfall.

The second is a very valid 'quality message' that gives me a reason to think "Might try Greggs today or soon".

The third MIGHT make me go in today to take advantage of the promotion, but I won't have noticed it.

Either the client has insisted to put in multiple messages.

The agency can't help trying 'brand stuff' in what is response stuff.

Or one or both hasn't a clue.

Now here's Oasis, with a 6 sheet, who are activating 'thirst' at point of need with a personality wrapper -rather than confusing brand with activation.

Scratch that, they've realised that single-mindedly tapping into a needs and doing it with the right tone and wit can deliver crisply - doing a longer term brand job as well as 'activation'

Just saying.