red stitching turn-ups

Younger readers may find this hard to imagine, but there was a time not so long ago when simply buying a pair of straight leg Levis jeans was something of a task.

More specifically, for the early-teen punky-mod me in 1979 in provincial Aberdeen obtaining a pair of shrink-to-fit 501XX's was even more arduous, and often required a 3 hour bus trip to Glasgow or engaging an obliging relative in London to secure.

The correct Levi's, however, were important items to own.

Because the distinctive 501XX red stitching visible when the jeans were turned up was one of the key signals of one's status among the rest of the group.

A slightly more discerning in-group within the broader mod in-group if you like.

One simple glance at another young mod's turn-ups was all one needed to do in order to make a judgement of their perspicacity.

To this day I'm as picky, however about different things.

In the case of a unified theory of advertising I'm less likely to satisfice.

But I'm happy enough with Gap jeans these days in case you are wondering.

Although, of course, the distinctive red stitching of original 501's is now standard issue with any form of 'selvedge' denim, available for 50 bucks in just about any retailer that sells jeans.

(Signals have a shelf life, at some point what they signal, changes and they may end up signalling something else entirely.)

And so fast forward to 2014 and we are in a workshop session at a marketing conference.
The delegates are broken into groups of six or so and the facilitator announces a task that the groups are required to solve.

We are asked to quickly, and just for fun, come up with some ideas around 'how to get people TO CONSUME MORE' of a particular product (and using certain tactics/techniques we have been learning about).

As you can imagine, I reverted to type and immediately found a problem with the task.

Surely, we were being asked the wrong question?

Is not the single most important task for marketing and advertising to achieve about growing market penetration?

So therefore the correct question should be 'how do we get MORE PEOPLE TO CONSUME product X'.

As I began scribbling an approximation of an NBD type distribution curve the fella sat next to immediately spotted what I was doing.

The rest of the group were oblivious however the first merest hint of the Dirichlet and the pair of us were in complete understanding of each other's point of view.

Like a nerdy marketing science equivalent of teenage mods noticing each other's turn-ups.

The truth is, in advertising today there seems to be nothing that polarises opinion quite as much as the 'How Brands Grow' effect. You are either in or out, there's very little middle ground.

I recall on one occasion meeting with another Planning Director at an agency I was courting and tentatively dropped a couple of thinly veiled EB-esqe phrases into our conversation.

He noticed my 'red stitching' immediately and kindly offered that I need not be coy, he was also a subscriber. Ha.

However the principle objection to scientific marketing ideas seems to come from creative quarters.

'I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.'

So said Bill Bernbach.

Bernbach, as we all know, was one of the key players in the so-named 'creative revolution' within advertising in the early 60's - one that was, in many ways, a revolution against the prevailing ideas of the likes of Rosser Reeves.

Whereas the Reeves approach was 'claim based'- he is the inventor of the USP, after all - and could be described as somewhat formulaic, the Bernbach approach was the antithesis, all out creativity.

It was this more 'functional' Reeves approach that Bernbach was describing as 'science'.
Not actual science.

[Fair play to old Rosser. you know you've made it when you get a logical fallacy named after you.]

My sense is that if Bill were around today he would be embracing the emerging field of marketing science for the space it creates for free creativity.

There is a final passage in the famous paper entitled 'Brand Advertising as Creative Publicity' by Helen Bloom, Rachel Kennedy, Andrew Ehrenberg and Neil Barnard; and published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 2002, that may have tickled Bernbach.

The authors propose that brand advertising seems to work best by simply creatively publicising a brand (salience), and not by trying to persuade people that the brand differs from other brands, or is even better or best.

'Some people fear that this 'mere publicity' stance is unhelpful to creatives. But we suggest that the exact opposite is the case.

Advertising a better mousetrap is fairly easy if it is in fact a bit better. One can, for instance, just say so. But having to center your advertising on adding year after year some indiscernible 'Whiter and Brighter' product-boon can restrict the kind of creativity that aims at memorable impacts for the brand.

In contrast, publicizing a brand gives ample scope for imaginative insights and for disciplined marketing communication skills.

This can stimulate creativity, that is, making distinctive and memorable publicity for the brand out of next to nothing. This seems the hallmark of good advertising as we know it. We think still that advertising a competitive brand means just 'Telling a brand story well', without there being just one solution.

There is huge scope-the campaign need not be hemmed in by the brand's 'selling proposition.'

In a recent post we mentioned renowned German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer's 'recognition heuristic'.

'Firms that spend their money on buying space in your recognition memory know this. Similarly politicians advertising their names and faces rather than their policies, and colleges, wannabe celebrities, and even small nations operate on the principle that if we do not recognise them, we will not favor them.

Taken to the extreme, being recognised becomes the goal in itself'.

Another way of describing salience and creative publicity.

[Indeed, Gigerenzer even offers a specific smart recognition heuristic for buying hi-fi equipment with minimum effort.

'Choose a brand you recognize and the second least expensive model'.]

For creative types this scientific approach should be liberating. To be free from dealing with message comprehension, USPs, positioning and differentiation and instead inhabit a world where the principle requirement is using unreasonable creativity to get branded ideas noticed and remembered.

And as Professor Sharp says in 'How Brands Grow'.

'...the primary task of advertising agencies is to generate ideas that viewers will notice and and will be willing to process over and over. This process must be brand-centric; it must refresh the memory structures that relate to the brand. This is a difficult task, which is why most advertising fails.”

Difficult? Yes.
Impossible? No.

To paraphrase Rory Sutherland; this appliance of science frees us from a 'world where creativity is heavily policed but where shallow rationality is a allowed to run rampant.'


What better  creative challenge than to be able to battle on a level playing field with everything else in the culture that competes for bits of our attention?

So as we started this article talking about Levi's, it seems fair to end it with their latest campaign. I'll leave it to you to decide whether this new direction is likely to do much for recognition or memory structures.

However as clue to the feelings here at Boat Global HQ, in spite of the disfluency and general unfathomable-ness of the tagline, it is the irony of that line is perhaps the most salient thing on view.

Just Don't Bore Them?

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shoplifters of the world, unite and take over (or: why online advertising is mostly a flop)

Yes, we can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and require little in the way of thinking.

We are mostly reasonably skilled at performing a number of 'automatic' or 'system 1' type processes - chatting to a passenger and listening to the radio while driving, for instance.

However effortful mental activities activities that interfere with each other, multiplying 17 x 24 while making a right turn into dense traffic - the example Kahneman often uses - is much more difficult and should probably not be attempted.

On occasions when I have to interrupt a colleague to answer a question or something, I ask - as they are typing or whatever

'Can you multi-task for a moment?'

'Of course' is the reply.

The subject then either stops what they were doing to listen to my request.

Or continues to type, more or less ignoring me as I speak.

Either way it goes I derive some psychologist humour from the situation.

The truth being that no-one can multi-task particularly.

Magicians and illusionists understand this better than most, particularly those who practice 'close-up' magic of the kind that is often performed at restaurant tables.

One of our favourites is the famous Derren Brown example. In one of his TV shows Derren was able to 'pay' a Hatton Garden jeweller with blank pieces of paper for a 1000GBP watch, by sufficiently distracting the vendor's system 2 with complicated questions about London bus routes.

I was once inspired by this trick and managed to get an Australia Post employee to bag two imported British music mags worth about $50 for free by confusing him with questions about domestic Australian vs overseas stamps.

As I am sinply an enthusiastic amateur psychology geek rather than a habitual shoplifter, I returned to the counter within a few moments and coughed up. The smugness of winning was reward enough.

The term for this is inattentional blindness, and is most famously demonstrated by the famous invisible gorilla experiment.

Inattentional blindness occurs when selective, focused attention towards one task renders us 'blind' to other peripheral happenings around us.

However both mine and Derren's experiments are dwarfed by this example of real world shoplifting skill as reported by ABC news.



A Texas woman has succeeded in stealing $57,000 worth of iPads from various Wal-Mart stores by loading up her trolley with various sundry items, allowing the cashier to scan the ipads, placing these items in her own handbag then informing the cashier that she needs to nip back to aisle 3 for teabags or something then marching straight out of the store while the hapless Wal-Mart employee is busy scanning the rest of the items in the basket.

So we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

This could go some way to explaining the general failure of online advertising versus the continued effectiveness of, less fashionable, outdoor advertising.

It is simply far more easy - extreme creativity allowing - to get a tiny bit of attention from people who are not concentrating on doing something else that is more important.



Tried living in the real world instead of a shell.

But... I was bored before I even began.

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a note on recognition heuristics and moving from party tricks to business results

Until recently we were unfamiliar with the German psychologist, Gerd Gigerenzer.

It turns out that Gigerenzer and Kahneman were at odds for many years.

This is despite that both researched and studied heuristics and came to about 95% of the same conclusions, however the principle point of conflict appeared to be; Gigerenzer believed in a kind of ‘expert intuition’, whereas Kahneman is more sceptical.

Whereas the Kahneman and Tversky school (ie much of the behavioural economics lobby) principally associate heuristics and biases with human error  (to be fair, in Thinking Fast and Slow DK does say that his view had softened over time, much System one activity can also be described as 'skill'), Gigerenzer assert that heuristics not necessarily cost the decision-maker and are often 'smart'.

These are the semantics that cause the big rifts in Academia. Heh.

What is initially startling about Gigerenzer's ‘Gut Feelings’ (we are reading this just now) is how much of his schtick Gladwell appropriated for ‘Blink’.

In 'Gut Feelings' Gigerenzer references H G Wells, who famously noted "If we want to have an educated citizenship in a modern technological society, we need to teach them three things: reading, writing, and statistical thinking."

To this day we teach reading and writing to children but not yet statistical thinking in any significant way.

Perhaps we won't get much better at avoiding certain cognitive slip-ups until this is addressed.

An example of a typical statistical error is given from the New Scientist magazine.

A Food inspector visited a restaurant in Salt Lake City famous for its quiches made from four fresh eggs. She told the owner that according to FDA research every fourth egg has salmonella bacteria, so the restaurant should only use three eggs in a quiche.

Clang.

Anyway, Gigerenzer describes a 'smart heuristic' as a tool for making good decisions in an uncertain world, where one sometimes has to ignore information in order to make an optimal choice.

His principal gift to the advertising world is one such smart heuristic - it should be said that this one crops up less frequently than it's usefullness would indicate - the recognition heuristic.

In simple terms, this means that when faced with a choice between something familiar and something unfamiliar, people tend to opt for the former, and this choice is often the best choice.

In other words, it's usually sensible that people should place a higher value on something they recognise over an alternative that is less familiar.

Therefore recognition based heuristics help consumers choose which brands to buy in frequently purchased categories.

Another way to describe this is salience.
Salience in this context, being the propensity of a brand to come to mind in buying situations.

It seems simple but, and this is something you can try at home, when asked to name as many brands in a particular category as possible, people can rarely name more than three or four in that first instant.

After a few moments thought a few more can come to mind, but theres rarely that kind of reflection in a buying situation.

Though when read a list of brands in a given category then people will be 'aware' of a far larger number.

Therefore, unaided salience is an better predictor of the brands people will buy.

And a useful example of a recognition-based heuristic.

As Professor Sharp notes in 'How Brands Grow'; there are many brands that buyers could consider, if they had thought of them.

I've introduced the good Professor at this point for a specific purpose.

I attended the MSIX (Marketing Science Ideas Exchange) conference in Sydney last week.

A fuller review of this I intend to write shortly, but one of the stand out (salient) points was made by one of the speakers - a non-marketing person - Jon Williams of PwC who said that for behavioural economics to have an impact on business/marketing then 'we need to move from party tricks to business results'.

My sense is that is what Professor Sharp was alluding to in an article he published in Marketing Mag this week entitled 'Behavioural Economics is not the big story in marketing'.

Professor Sharp says:

'But what really worries me is that this infatuation with theatrical psychology lab experiments – that show participants in lab experiments can be nudged without knowing it – is bringing back a discredited theory of brand image of besotted/manipulated consumers'

Then goes on to describe recognition heuristics almost exactly.

'Yes, consumers use heuristics to make ‘good enough’, not perfect, decisions. But they use these heuristics because they work rather well. For example, the assumption that higher-priced items are better quality works pretty well because it’s largely true.

Then later adds.

....don’t forget that the main reason your sales aren’t what you’d like them to be is that your brand doesn’t have the mental and physical availability to produce the demand that you would like.'

Many months ago I read a piece by Mark Earls who also expressed some scepticism abut the ability of behavioural economics to paint the whole picture. At the time this didn't really register however there is a picture becoming clearer now that is pointing towards a more unified theory.

What Professor Sharp describes as 'mental availability' - or salience - is the same thing that Gigerenzer would describe as recognition. A major factor in recognition is the sense of popularity - and this is core to Mark Earls's thesis.

These factors combine to create demand.

Fulfilling demand, however, is heavily dependent on 'physical availability' and much of the so-called 'party tricks' of nudg-ery are perhaps best employed in that context, if only from the point of view that even if recognition is a principle driver we will tend to 'satisfice' right at the last second if one of the other couple of brands that are salient present themselves more easily.

Anyway, to round off we were delighted to discover the very first TV ad for the fledgeling VW Golf featuring The Munich Beefeaters Dixieland Band with one Gerd Gigerenzer on the steering wheel and banjo.

As an undergraduate Gigerenzer was a keen trad-jazz banjo player, playing in jazz bands at night in order to fund his university studies.

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when johnny comes marching home

This Guinness spot from the US caught our eye, from a scientific standpoint.

Perhaps a teeny bit schmaltzy and all-American for Aussie tastes but worth noting it does a few things well.



Well branded right from the off, the product in action using repetition.

The core narrative is, of course, super easy to get, it's 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home'.

Bar 'America The Beautiful' that's as full-on a slice of Apple Pie as one gets.

[Funnily enough the lyrics to When Johnny Comes Marching Home were written by the bandleader Patrick Gilmore, an Irish immigrant during the American Civil War.

Even more peculiarly the song was widely adopted and sung by both sides.]

One responds emotionally (I detected a slight physiological response too, you may also depending on how much of a wuss you are).

I’ve trained myself to let go in these matters and be the punters - don’t fight it, feel it - and duly recorded a nice tight peak-end rule being deftly applied.

Also worth noting that the main creative device employed is in the area of 'personal triumph'.

Johnny makes it all the way home.

If you've perused Karen Nelson-Field's findings on viral (or not) video then you will have noted that the data would suggest that this device is the one that tends to benefit from more shares than others, with the caveat of significant paid promotion to maximise initial reach applied.

Gung ho.

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the great advertising swindle (actor-observer bias remix)

Advertising's outcomes are notoriously hard to measure.

Which is why in advertising agencies, we love to measure outputs instead.

Agency outputs (ie creativity, ingenuity, technical wizardry and planning cleverness) are far easier to evaluate than the contributions that the work has to actual client business outcomes.

Despite this clients will often clamour for performance based remuneration deals from their agencies.

Some agencies even claim to offer this.

How they can do this is unclear.

I'm oft to remark that if it were possible then Y&R London should still be receiving a performance based royalty from Heinz Beans for the work of their then deputy creative director, the young Maurice Drake, who penned the famous tagline 'Beanz Meanz Heinz' over a couple of pints of a lunchtime back in 1967.

Maybe they are, who knows?

The fact is that the effects of great advertising often take a long time to unfold.

And many other factors other than the advertising will affect brand performance.

(The effects of shit advertising tend to reveal themselves much sooner, of course).

So when, among its peers/competitors, agencies performance can - for the most part - only be evaluated in terms of the creative output, then the agencies themselves are highly incentivised to squeeze the juice out of those outputs regardless of whether those outputs can be said to have contributed to business outcomes.

Even the planners effectiveness awards, known as Effies, are no more precise, for the most part only describe shorter term effectiveness, and are often forced to rely on qual/quant research of highly dubious methodology (such is the ineptitude of our market research cousins, but that's another topic for another time.)

Perhaps you have been following the ad scam kerfuffle over at Aussie media commentator website mUmBRELLA.

If not, then in summary, it has come to light that a few Australian press ads that picked up Lions at Cannes this year benefited from somewhat 'limited' distribution.

While the ads met with the criteria for entry, it has been argued that running one time in a suburban newspaper of little consequence is not fair play.

There's plenty of opinion around this. Several articles have been written, each receiving large numbers of comments.

I'm not going to add further opinion, but perhaps offer some thoughts towards the beginnings of an explanation.

From personal experience I've played in two broad camps.

Both highly incentivised to pursue award-winning activities.

In big network agencies, consistently receiving global and local awards was an absolute imperative.

At [agency X], for example, every Monday morning we would roll in to work and be curious to find out which awards the agency had won over the weekend.

And every significant piece of work seemed to have its creative award entry case study video constructed almost in parallel to development of the campaign itself.

To my knowledge there was never anything cooked up specifically to try and manipulate creative awards, however every piece of work was evaluated internally for its creative award potential, and certain pro-bono work was often considered for the same reasons.

There's nothing hokey about this approach. It's correct.

However, if a major award show came and went where the agency performed poorly in terms of metal then one could feel the pressure to return to winning ways a soon as possible.

In this environment, where success is routine, then winning becomes table stakes.

In smaller agencies or even decent sized indies there is a different sort of pressure.

To level the playing field then these agencies have to look that little bit harder to find the opportunities to generate outputs that can stand up against the outputs of agencies with more resources and better clients.

One could describe the situation as a kind of agency double jeopardy.

Smaller agencies get hit twice. They have fewer, less sophisticated and resource rich clients, who also tend to be less loyal.

This provides the smaller agency with plenty incentive to 'maximise' and then possibly manipulate outputs in order to portray their creative abilities in the best way.

Because no agency is going to attract new sophisticated clients with a portfolio of mediocre work.

By hook or by crook you need to get the goods.

Now, we are aware that the agencies under scrutiny in the Aussie case are DDB, Saatchi's and to a slightly lesser degree JWT. All outposts of big global networks, not small by any stretch.

However, the Aussie market is somewhat peculiar inasmuch as just about every global network has an office in at least two (often 3 or more) of the major cities.

Everyone is scrapping with everyone else.

In the absence of any way to meaningfully measure clients' business outcomes, the industry evaluates itself in the only way it can. Though outputs - and in the arena of award shows.

The volume and quality of new business an agency attracts is explicitly connected to the volume and quality of the awards they accrue.

The more you get, the more you get.

Without making any judgement call on what-is-or-is-not-scam perhaps some clarity comes from knowing this about our own foibles as an industry.

And perhaps it might not be a bad thing to put this years what-is-or-is-not-scam debate to bed and get on with next years award winners.

Because, as an industry perhaps we suffer from a collective actor-observer bias.

When we judge our own agency's behaviour, we are the actors, and perhaps we are more likely to attribute our actions as a response to peculiarities of the situational factors of the industry; than to any general sense of our integrity or lack of.

However, when explaining the behaviour of others (our competitor agencies), we are far more inclined to attribute their scam ads to their overall cheating-bastard disposition rather than to any of the situational factors that influenced us.

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stand and deliver

Pop stars talking about advertising. What could possibly go wrong?

Corporate rapper Kanye West for a start.

Consider, his much repeated quote-age from Cannes for example.

“I dream to help raise the palette and raise the taste level of a generation and also be involved with the production and distribution and advertising of that thing everyone’s begging for.”

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.



Adam Ant, however, knew a thing or two about the role for advertising and its subsequent effectiveness. And preferred to express this in how the work spoke for itself.

'I'm the dandy highwayman who you're too scared to mention

I spend my cash on looking flash and grabbing your attention'

It's not that difficult.

Spend the cash on looking flash.

Then get noticed.

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shot with your own gun (or the META-return of the texas sharpshooter fallacy)

The sciences of human behaviour show that we all are susceptible to foibles known as cognitive biases.

These are processes of thinking that can sometimes lead us to making less than optimal decisions - particularly in conditions of uncertainty - or more often just relatively benign and harmless routine confabulations.

In the following case, the firm favourite - confirmation bias.

This is our tendency of people to favour information that confirms pre-existing beliefs or hypotheses.

And it's often compounded with a touch of the old texas sharpshooter fallacy.

Refreshingly, from time to time behavioural economists themselves are just as likely as any of us to be caught in these cognitive traps.

In theory, this analysis in Smart Company of how the celebrated Sarah Wilson’s 'I Quit Sugar' books and 'community' have helped a large number of people adopt more healthy behaviours seems to add up.

A slightly edited excerpt follows that links BE staples status quo bias, intrinsic motivation, loss aversion and social proof with positive and negative tension.

Here we go.

'[Wilson uses] positive tension to create anxiety about status quo [and] create an appetite for change.

By pointing to the gap between what’s undesirable now and what is a desirable future you can stimulate sufficient motivation in your customer to be open to changing their behaviour.

Loss Aversion tells us that people are more motivated to avoid loss than seek gain, so you need to work hard to reduce the perceived downside of progressing with you...overcoming negative tension to build people’s willingness to change.

By providing step-by-step meal plans as well as cooking and shopping tips, Sarah reduces people’s fear that a life without sugar is too difficult.

Further, through a thriving blog (engaging over 260,000 every day) and social media presence (over 385,000 followers) Sarah has harnessed a community of advocates and tapped into the behavioural principle of Social Proof.

People new to the materials or program who may feel anxious about whether it will work for them can have their fears allayed by seeing how many others have succeeded. There’s no surer anxiety-buster than knowing that someone else has done it before you.

This analysis is not wrong. We just smiled at it's possible over-theoreticalness.

[And before you start, sure, the irony of that statement is not lost on us...]

Another, perhaps simpler, explanation for the success of the 'I Quit Sugar' phenomenon can be found by applying the Fogg Behaviour Model.



Central to Fogg's theory is that increasing motivation is very hard and almost never works.

Making the desired behaviour easier, even where there is low motivation is generally a much better plan.

For Wilson's wannabe-sugar-free readers there is already likely to be a high motivation to change their behaviour, however because of a perceived lack of ability, it seems hard to do.

In cases like this Fogg recommends the use of a 'faciltator' trigger.

Make the desired behaviour easy by showing people who are motivated how to do it, easily.

Wilson's books, forums, recipes are facilitators, and this is how her empire has been built.

Buy making something that used to be hard, easy.

And branding it well.

Of course, there's more than one way to skin a cat, and the planner joke applies, sometimes what works in practice doesn't always work in theory.

Having said that, we are signed up for the Marketing Science Idea Exchange later this month, at which the author of the piece is conducting a couple of workshops.

In the spirit of idea exchange, hopefully we shall not be sent to the back of the class.

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space travel's in my blood, and there ain't nothing I can do about it

We've just finished reading 'Think Like A Freak', the third book by Levitt and Dubner the others being Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics. You may also know their weekly WNYC radio show/podcast.

Their ouvre is at the lighter pop end of the behavioural economics canon, however they can take some of the biggest credit for opening up this thinking to a mass audience.

Either way it's an entertaining read, I got through in about two round trips to Hobart.

There's one little story towards the end concerning the January 1986 Nasa Space Shuttle mission which I suspect that many of you - my planning brothers and sisters - will identify with.

The following is almost as it appears in the book, I've paraphrased/shortened it a bit...

The launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger had already been delayed several times, both nasa themselves and the engineers were getting twitchy.

However on January 28, 1986, it looked like Nasa could finally launch from Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

This particular mission had drawn lot of interest from the public, mainly because the crew was to include a civilian, a schoolteacher called Christa McAuliffe.

However some unusually cold overnight temperatures in the nights before the launch led the chief engineer Allen McDonald to recommended to his Nasa client that they postpone once more.

McDonald and his team of engineers explained that the cold weather might damage the rubber O-rings that kept hot gases from escaping the shuttle boosters, indeed, the boosters had never even been tested at temperatures as low as forecast.

Nasa pushed back, they wanted a launch.

Years later Mcdonald wrote about this.

"This was the first time that Nasa personnel ever challenged a recommendation that was made that said it was unsafe to fly.

For some strange reason we found ourselves being challenged to prove quantitatively that it would definitely fail, and we couldn't do that."

So the advice of the engineers was ignored and the launch was officially back on.

McDonald - and his team of experts - had been overruled.

In fact when Nasa came and asked McDonald to sign off on the decision to launch he refused.

His boss signed it off instead.

So the next morning, Space Shuttle Challenger took off as scheduled.

73 seconds later Challenger blew up in mid-air, killing everyone on board.

A subsequent enquiry found that explosion was caused by a failure of O-rings due to the cold weather.

Interesting.

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vivid demonstration vivid metaphor

It seems simplistic but I'm consistently surprised at how often an explicit description of the actual role for the advertising is absent from first attempts at creative briefs I see.

There are principally two roles, but lack of clarity around either or both often means wholesale back to the drawing board for the author.

Stephen King set the template for these two roles while he was inventing Account Planning back in the day, and even to this day no-one has come up with a better or simpler model.

We're either creating advertising that seeks a fairly direct response or a fairly indirect response. Or a specific cocktail of both.

At the indirect end of the scale, what King would describes as vivid metaphor, is advertising that is 'borrowing something from outside the brand itself which has personality characteristics that are similar to the ones we want our brand to have.'

Here's to the crazy ones and suchlike.

At the other more direct and less fashionable end of the spectrum these days; are the vivid demonstrations. These kind usually pick out and dramatise some specific feature of a product or brand and frame it in 'what's in it for you' manner.

The following couple of ads from Aldi seem to be an exemplary blend of the two roles.

A vivid demonstration of the principal benefit (cheapness).

And it's probably not too much of a stretch to say that the various surprising creative devices employed are a vivid metaphor for the surprise element of the actual brand experience itself.

Who among us has not headed straight for the middle aisles for a chainsaw and flippers on a sunday morning.

These are also possibly some of the best examples in recent months of the continuing triumph of meaningless distinctiveness over meaningful differentiation, and for 15seconds of hardcore retail to be so choc-full of 'idea' they are an inspiration for any of us out there with big box retail clients to serve.





Behavioural footnote:

At the core of Aldi's Strategy is a deep understanding of how we actually buy.

The mental shortcuts we use to make it easy for ourselves.

Despite what marketers might like to believe most people hold practically no brand knowledge whatsoever, even for brands we like and buy regularly.

Because the shampoo we buy is the green one. The toilet paper is the one with the purple stripe etc.

*UPDATE 14-07*

And now we love this series even more, the latest one has the classic enclothed cognition gag.

Like retail ads. Only better.

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the wheels on the bus go round and round, all through town...

On a very basic level, advertising should probably do two things.

Putting low involvement processing aside for the moment, here's one of them.

Hopefully the other side of the bus says 'be well branded'.

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does culture really eat strategy for breakfast?

Culture, in an organisational sense, is usually interpreted as the collective behaviours, attitudes and beliefs that - when mixed together - create a particular set of norms within said organisation.

Culture within the organisation gives people direction, and makes it easier for employees to find their way at work without having to think that much and get along with other people in the organisation.

Obviously there can be 'good' culture and 'bad' culture, depending on your point of view.

There are themes that many organisations seem to share.
Uniqueness is one of those.

For the most part unique culture is really a set of generic rules. 

Usually along these lines.

1. Be and think positively (this means total enthusiasm for any new idea, no matter how stupid)

2. Embrace change (but never ask why?)

3. Never criticise the work of others (see point 1)

4. Only look forward, never back (see point 1, again)

However, within those companies where culture is said to eat strategy for breakfast, it is reported that this clear set of shared values and norms actually shapes the way a company operates and is a fundamental driver of the financial success of the business.

A picture of this kind of strong culture features passionate, empowered employees, deeply engaged.

High performing teams, trusting each other, communicating authentically and powering the business towards financial growth and reaching new heights of innovation.

And it all sounds plausible, especially when the usual suspects are presented as case in point.

Zappos, Google, Ben & Jerry's, Starbucks are among the most frequently mentioned.

They have dynamic, engaged leaders, organic and vibrant self directed employees, empowered to take risks and fail-fast while truly caring about making a difference in the world. Etc etc.

It certainly seems plausible that culture does, indeed, eat strategy for breakfast*.

[*The quote itself is attributed to Peter Drucker, though there's no evidence he ever said it - other than the anecdotal evidence of Mark Fields from Ford Motor Company, who attributed it to Drucker in a 2006 speech. In any case Peter Drucker is on record noting that culture is hard to change, therefore it's sensible to try and work with whatever you’ve got].

So the fashionable idea is that within these kind of environments the sheer force of strong culture wills the organisation to success. Poor old strategy is relegated to a mere administrative function.

My fear is that the 'breakfast' quote has been skunk-ified and it's proponents are somewhat culpable of mistaking story-telling for fact.

I recently participated on the jury in an advertising awards show. One of my categories to judge was the 'agency of the year' prize. Around 7 or 8 finalists gave their presentations to the jury, each of them presented a section that outlined their respective 'unique values'.

You guessed it, all of the agencies unique values were practically identical. You could probably reel them off yourself right now, with no prompting. All bar one, I should add.

The agency in question presented no values at all, however did present a set of behaviours. Had it been down to me only they would have won the category. As it goes, they came second but that deviation from convention stuck with me.

Anyway, this interpretation of 'breakfast' is like a halo effect - a perception of one quality is contaminated by a more readily available quality. For example because Kanye West is a successful pop-rapper he must therefore know something about the advertising business and should be allowed to lecture us from Cannes.

In his book The Halo Effect Phil Rosenzweig describes (among nine distinct business delusions) the delusion of the wrong end of the stick.

The wrong end of the stick being a halo effect that tricks us into getting causes the wrong way round.

Is it that companies with a strong culture perform better?

Or is it companies with clear goals and strategies to achieve those goals (to paraphrase Rumelt; companies that are doing the work to uncover the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors) are the high performing or growing companies that tend to get a better culture?

Yes, culture can eat strategy for breakfast but if theres no strategy on the breakfast table then culture will get pretty hungry and grumpy.

Does this sound conservative to you?

Well, the 'breakfast' lobby does appear to be the voice of the new digital business.

Purpose before profit right?

It's the sharing economy, that 'could just save the least advantaged from ravages of capitalism' according to poster child and 'culture driven' TPG private equity funded Airbnb.

Where presumably culture is eating strategy for breakfast.

Rushkoff puts it this way.

'[Silicon Valley start-ups] claiming to be saving the world, when they’re really just the latest generation of desperate yuppies chasing capital and,in turn, reinforcing Wall Street’s monopoly over our society. Digital business is revolutionary only in the way it camouflages business as usual.'

For those of us in advertising, rather than simply selling a respectable service we can pretend that we are doing something much more grandiose.

If business is really going to contribute to a better world then we're best advised to focus on providing better strategy for culture to eat.

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the bitterest pill

By three methods we may learn wisdom:

First, by reflection, which is noblest;

Second, by imitation, which is easiest;

and

Third, by experience, which is the most bitter.

- Confucius

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do it clean

Fellow behavioural enthusiasts will no doubt be familiar with the Fogg Behaviour model.

Just in case you're not, it was developed by BJ Fogg founder of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University.

Amongst other accolades his model was selected by the World Economic Forum as their framework for health behaviour change in 2011.

At its core the model describes how three elements must come together at about the same time in order for a behaviour to occur: motivation, ability and a trigger.

Therefore the propensity for a behaviour to happen increases dramatically when one is highly motivated to attempt the behaviour (either as an individual or in a social context) and it's an easy behaviour to actually do.

With that in mid we were delighted with this simple behavioural design innovation that would go some way to solving a common problem in hospitals.

Apparently about 1 in 20 patients in U.S. hospitals get some form of unnecessary infection during their stay in hospital, adding re-treatment costs of up to $40bn every year.

There's even an acronym for it - HAI (Hospital Acquired Infection) - MRSA is probably one of the more salient nasty examples.

A lot of this problem can be attributed to the spread of infection from hands that are not properly clean. Even with the best intentions it is reported that doctors and nurses only sanitise about half the time.

The common solution - wall mounted hand-sanitiser dispensers at entries and exits - are proving to be less effective than it was hoped.

With other, more pressing things on their mind, staff, patients and visitors simply forget to use them, or do not notice them.

So what’s the solution?

Make it automatic, make it easy.

How about combining the behaviour of sanitising with a behaviour hospital workers do every day?

Like opening doors (trigger).



Pull Clean has been developed by London studio The Agency of Design and was brought to our attention via the OgilvyChange newsletter.

Which leads us to our second medical facility design problem, and perhaps this prototype - developed for Nanjing hospital, capital of Jiangsu province in China to aid the extraction of sperm from infertility patients - by way of contrast, fails the behavioural design model test somewhat.

Designed for patients for whom the the old-fashioned method of letting-loose-the-juice was difficult we're inclined to think that only the more adventurous patients will have sufficient motivation to give this a go - bearing in mind that the environment in which a behaviour is expected to occur contributes significantly to both the motivation and ability of the subject to perform - and how this is easier than the manual method is difficult to fathom.

Perhaps some of the same behavioural design thinking that went into PullClean could improve this other pull problem?

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why the 'sharing' economy is 'keeping up with the joneses'

For an explanation of the current infatuation with the so-called 'sharing economy' then it's worth considering some of the ideas of Thorstein Veblen outlined in 'The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions'.

Published in 1899 it's a detailed social critique of 'conspicuous consumption', as a function of social-class consumerism.

Veblen was probably one of the great grandfathers of behavioural economics.

His view of people was generally one of 'irrational creatures who relentlessly pursue social status with little regard to their own happiness'.

This was clearly counter to the dominant classical economic theory.

When Veblen describes nineteenth-century aristocrats as spending their 'leisure' time fox hunting or learning obscure languages he says; that in order to be successful (as a signal), the signs of this conspicuous display needed to portray themselves as at least superficially useful or socially beneficial.

That is, it needs to pretend to be something other than what it really is.

Eg: fox hunting as some sort of duty to protect the livelihoods of serfs/farmers.
The learning of obscure languages is probably the 19thC equivalent of our reading of self-help books.

Perhaps compare these 19th century aristo behaviours with some of today’s celebrities.

Bono has accrued considerable wealth but - as he is not likely to trouble the pop charts again and therefore bugger-all to do all day - turning up at the UN to save the world is helping to resolve some sort of cognitive dissonance around leisure and privilege.

Don't even get me started on royals.

The language of this sharing (or collaborative) economy manifests in terms like 'empowered people', 'co-creation', 'peers' and 'crowdfunding', yet this movement's poster child - AirBnB - closed its latest round of funding with an injection of $500 million, led by private equity firm TPG.

Because these imagined socially beneficial properties of the so-called collaborative economy serve to solve a cognitive dissonance for buyers of those services.

It disguises the real motivation - which is, of course, status-seeking.

In other words, it’s marketing.

The idea of a 'sharing economy' is simply an extension of our culture's other dominant marketing idea - conspicuous authenticity.

When the big supermarkets joined in the ‘organic’ game a few years back one would have imagined that those who truly believed in the benefits of organic produce would have welcomed this as a good thing.

Now that ordinary shoppers could have access to organic produce then surely that would mean we would all have the opportunity to eat healthier and live in a better environment, right?

But the more organic became available to the mass of ordinary consumers, the less it is serves as a source of distinction for the status seekers.

Hence the original organic brigade moved on to ‘local diet’ as the next logical step. Then when that caught-on then ‘artisanal’ became the next expression of more-authentic-than-thou. (8 dollar toast, anyone?)

In ‘The Authenticity Hoax’, author Andrew Potter describes a ‘basic fusion of the two ideals of the privately beneficial and the morally praiseworthy’ as the ‘bait-and switch’ (or cognitive dissonance) at the heart of ‘the authenticity hoax.’

‘This desire for the personal and the public to align explains why so much of what passes for authentic living has a do-gooder spin to it. Yet the essentially status-oriented nature of the activity always reveals itself eventually.‘

This same bait and switch is at the very core of the collaborative economy.

Which is fine, as long as we recognise this.

The collaborative economy is no revolution. It is ordinary consumerism, built on the same economic system and appealing to the same ‘irrational creatures who relentlessly pursue social status with little regard to their own happiness’ as described by Veblen in 1899.

The the collaborative economy is pure marketing of a kind of fake authenticity that solves a cognitive dissonance problem for status-seeking consumers – their (pseudo) anti-consumerism hipster beliefs clash with their regular consumerist behaviours, so using the likes of Airbnb or LeftoverSwap allows them to tell themselves a story about authentic living with a do-gooder spin.

To paraphrase Potter, we live in the world of bullshit, but as long as you know it is bullshit, and as long as they know that you know it is bullshit, then it's a game we can all play.

As the bottom inevitably fell out of social media marketing as a thing a whole slew of social media analysts and such like have had to move on somewhere in order to dodge the rubble falling down around them.

A new shiny object was required.

Enter stage right; the sharing economy. But don’t go lighting the campfires and singing Kumbaya just yet.

The sharing economy is simply the new keeping up with the Joneses and the good old branding and consumer capitalism that we advertisers love.

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acausal connecting principles in the swing era

The pop stars of big-band years, the period from the mid-30's to mid 40's and often described as the 'swing era', were the band leaders.

These were usually virtuoso instrumentalists and 'conductors' of sorts.

Yer Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Tommy Dorsey among some of the most well known.

For the most part the singers in the big bands had to make do with being of secondary importance to the band leaders.

For example, the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra’s vocal chores were handled some semi-anonymous young fella by the name of Frank Sinatra.

The natural order of things was disrupted, however, in part due to a somewhat random event.

A strike in 1942 by the US musicians’ union, in a dispute over royalty payments led to a temporary stop on any new recordings being made, as union musicians halted recording for any record company.

Live performances were still permitted, but this posed problems for both the radio stations (who had only just got their heads around playing records in the first place) and, of course, the record companies themselves.

Among the workarounds that the radio dj's employed were importing new records from outside the US, and staging a wholesale revival of pre-40s recordings.

Things were not so simple for the record companies, however.

For a start, early developments in the emerging and popular new jazz style known later as bebop - being honed by the likes of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie - were never properly recorded. We can still lament this today.

Around the same time as the strike Frank Sinatra was becoming one of the first vocalists to emerge in their own right and had signed a solo deal with Columbia Records. Columbia wanted to get Sinatra product out as fast as possible, so, to get round the no-musicians rule, Sinatra suggested that they hire master arranger Alec Wilder and vocal group the Bobby Tucker Singers as back up.

Very soon the rest of the industry noticed that the musicians strike didn’t apply to the singers in the band.

The MU just represented players of instruments so the labels quickly put together vocal only groups featuring the big band back up singers - mimicking instrumental arrangements acapella - and the main vocalists pushed up front.

Not only was a new genre born but when the strike ended the market had moved on and those other vocalists who had previously had to stand in the shadow the band leaders were following Frank's lead and becoming the new stars.

While this flip would have probably happened anyway it's not much of a stretch to speculate that the situation perhaps brought the singers' day forward somewhat.

It's best described as a synchronicity - a ‘meaningful' coincidence.

A sequence of events that cannot be fully explained by simple cause and effect but are still connected.

And an example of a swift and nifty bit of innovation (by copying) in the face of necessity on behalf of the record industry.
And set the tone for all manner of Elvisness and James Brown et al to come.

The story of how the record industry were slow to recognise how digital distribution etc would impact their business model, and the consequences that followed, is well documented.

But its worth noting that, frankly, this was not always the way.

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there’s the first ad

Every agency I have worked with has used their own template variant of what we call the creative brief.

Some will mandate adherence to a specific template more than others.

Either way, the creatives receiving said brief are somewhat more uniform in their response.

They generally give a cursory glance to everything else and jump straight to the proposition/point of view/key idea section (whatever you want to call it).

On more than one occasion, and with different creative directors, it's been pointed out to me that the brief I have provided contained the same problem for them - namely the proposition.

As a 'former' creative that then shuffled over to the other (planner) side my tendency is still to describe the proposition/point of view as though it were a line or an ad idea, and it is written as such.

For some creatives this was not a popular approach.

Their argument being that they now have to work backwards to go forwards, dismantling this 'creative' proposition back into something non-idea-ish, in order to then take it forward into a legitimate creative idea.

That's one way of looking at it, I suppose.

Another way is to adopt the approach of John Hegarty - creative legend and the H in BBH.

We are re-reading John Steel's Truth, Lies and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning at the moment and in one chapter Steel reports on how Hegarty, too, headed straight for the proposition and similarly looked for a very simple, singleminded idea.

But Hegarty's next habit is described as this.

'[Hegarty would] take that one sentence and write it on a large piece of paper, above or below a picture of the product, almost as if the line from the brief were a headline.

Then he would pin it up above his desk and ask himself first whether the juxtaposition of that line and that product made some rational sense, and second, whether it also started to suggest something interesting on an emotional level'.

If there was something interesting there then...

'There’s the first ad in the campaign. It’s my job to create something better.'

That's endorsement enough for me to continue to write the brief as the ad for the ad.

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carpenters law

Measure twice. Cut once.

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how branding actually works

“If there was anything I'd learned, it's that the man never chooses the woman.
All he can do is give her an opportunity to choose him.”

― Neil Strauss, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.

Similarly it's not the brand that chooses the customer.
This is the great myth of 'targeting'.
All that brands can do is give customers an opportunity to choose them.

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future islands

After two weeks or so on heavy rotation on the office record player, this tune had began to worm it's way in to my brain.

On audio response only I was compelled to jump onto itunes and buy.

However the office music controllers instructed me that to find their Letterman performance on You Tube should be the first step.

Now I know why.

First time through is a bit strange, then about 5 repeat plays is the required dose, after that you are hooked.

Brilliant.

Whatever this is about. I BELIEVE him.

At the end, Letterman exclaims 'How about that? I'll take all of that you've got!'.

Yep.

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